We lost a giant this month. Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon, civil rights activist, songwriter, ethnomusicologist, author, and founder of musical ensemble Sweet Honey In The Rock, joined the ancestors on July 16 at the age of 81.
She may not have been a household name, but I would have had a hard time getting through many events that have taken place in my life without the strength she gave to me and others around me, imparted by her songs and the power of her voice.
Music plays a key role in both personal and political struggles. It heals, uplifts, builds bridges, makes sorrow bearable, motivates, and inspires. Dr. Reagon knew that and lived it during her 60-year career.
For many years as an activist, I have used one of her quotes as my signature. It epitomizes my thoughts, ideals, practice, and goals:
“If you're in a coalition and you're comfortable, you know it's not a broad enough coalition.”
I described what I felt about that quote in 2009, about a year after I arrived here at Daily Kos. My feelings haven’t changed. I bless her memory today and everyday.
”Black Music Sunday” is a weekly series highlighting all things Black music, with over 220 stories covering performers, genres, history, and more, each featuring its own vibrant soundtrack. I hope you’ll find some familiar tunes and perhaps an introduction to something new.
Bernice Johnson Reagon was born Bernice Johnson on October 4th, 1942 just outside of Albany, Georgia. Her parents, Beatrice and Reverend Jessie Johnson, raised Reagon and her siblings within the town’s closely connected African American community. Reagon describes this experience as “being raised by a whole community of people” rather than solely by her parents (Reagon 1986). She recalls living in close proximity to her relatives’ homes. Reagon’s schooling started young, and she was in fourth grade by the time she was seven years old. Following primary school, she and her siblings attended an all-Black high school.
Despite the ever-present racism that prevailed in the South, Reagon was able to establish a strong sense of self in the face of the most challenging odds. Her father’s role as a reverend in an all-Black church and her childhood in a primarily Black community ensured Reagon was brought up in an environment full of Black music and traditions. Her environment allowed her to constantly learn more about her culture. Heavy engagement with her community was a large factor in the passion she developed for Black identity and heritage.
In 1959, Reagon attended Albany State College (now Albany State University) where she majored in music. She also began to take an interest in activism and political organizing . Her interest fully took shape when she joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) as well as the National Association for Colored People (NAACP). During her time with each organization, she assisted in “voter registration drives and anti-segregation protests” (Americans Who Tell The Truth, n.d.). These tasks were central to the Albany Movement, as the campaign’s leaders aimed to address the lack of Albany’s Black residents registered to vote and the city’s refusal to desegregate (SNCC Digital Gateway 2021). The Movement also hosted workshops on how to hold peaceful demonstrations. To further their efforts, the Movement’s leaders also recruited local students to partake in the desegregation initiatives.
The SNCC Digiital Gateway website continues her story:
Johnson was suspended from Albany State for her activism. She spent a semester at Spelman College in Atlanta before joining SNCC’s newly-formed Freedom Singers in 1962. She married the group’s co-founder Cordell Reagon. The Freedom Singers toured the country to raise money for SNCC projects in the Deep South. The group also moved in and out of movement hotspots, using their music to provide a spark for local activism. “Basically the singing was the ‘bed’ and the ‘air’ of everything,” remembered Johnson. “I had never heard or felt singing do that on that level of power.”
In 1966, Johnson Reagon founded the Harambee Singers and in 1973, she formed Sweet Honey in the Rock, an all-women, African American a cappella group that sought to effect change and portray the Black experience through their voices. Johnson Reagon continued to use her powerful singing to allow others to study the African American oral tradition in radio, film, and concerts across the country.
Reagon talked with Smithsonian Folkways about how she had to face her own fears in order to find freedom.
Many people who attended the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on Aug. 28, 1963, were introduced to the SNCC Freedom Singers for the first time. Reagon was a member.
“I woke up this morning with my mind stayed on freedom” is a lyric from the Freedom Singers that highlights commitment and perseverance
Video notes:
Recorded live at the Newport Folk Festival, on July 26, 1963; The Freedom Singers: Bernice Johnson, Rutha Harris, Cordell Hull Reagon and Charles Neblitt. No folk-song trend of the last few years aroused so much attention as the use of "freedom songs" in the Negro civil rights movement. This is probably the greatest peacetime functional use of folk music since the labor movement organizing drive in the 1930's. Their "freedom songs" are old spirituals with renewed meaning for today, either in their original form or with new words. They are heard in jails, and at sit-ins, demonstrations, rallies and all tension points where morale needs a boost.
Four young activist in this struggle make up The Freedom Singers - Bernice Johnson, Rutha Harris, Cordell Hull Reagon and Charles Neblitt. The group formed in the winter of 1962 during the extended civil rights battles at Albany, Georgia, where music played a vital role in buoying up the spirits of the demonstrators. This is probably the only musical quartet all members of which have served time in jail. "Woke Up This Morning With My Mind Set On Freedom" is a popular modern gospel song with revised words and one of the most popular of the new "freedom songs." ~ Stacey Williams (from the liner notes)
Decades later, President Barack Obama celebrated their music.
On February 9, 2010, during Washington, D.C.'s worst snow storm on record, President Obama and the First Family joined Vice president Joe Biden, Cabinet members and other special guests, as well as students from around the country, to commemorate Black History Month with "In Performance at the White House: A Celebration of Music from the Civil Rights Movement."
In 1965, Reagon recorded “Folk Songs: The South” for Smithsonian Folkways Records.
I was living in Washington, D.C., in 1975, working to build the first minority-controlled public radio station, WPFW-FM Pacifica, when I heard Reagon’s Paradon Records album, “Give Your Hands to Struggle.”
The hair on my arms stood up while listening to her rendition of the gospel tune “Old Ship of Zion”:
The title tune, “Give Your Hands to Struggle,” opens with a call to take action
If you see me stumble,
Don’t stand back and look on.
Reach out, now, brother.
Give your hands to struggle.
We were blessed to have Sweet Honey come to the radio station to record several public service announcements and be interviewed on our women’s music program.
Journalist Michael Kernan profiled Reagon and her birthing of Sweet Honey In The Rock for Smithsonian Magazine in 1999 in “Conveying History Through Song”:
In Washington, while she was attending Howard University, she became vocal director of the D.C. Black Repertory Company, founded by actor Robert Hooks. Working with 20 to 30 voices and eight or nine harmony lines made the limitations of three- or four-part harmony unsatisfactory, she says, which led her to the difficult five-part sound of Sweet Honey In The Rock.
Thus, there are five singers in Sweet Honey, producing a sophisticated sound that is far more complex than the conventional quartet. Over the years the personnel has changed, for the singers have always by necessity worked part-time, and some 22 women have been members since the founding in 1973. Sweet Honey has performed in Africa and Canada, but mostly it covers the United States, from Maine to California, with more than 60 concerts a year, usually sold out weeks in advance. But Sweet Honey is only part of the story. Reagon has a grown son, Kwan, a cook, and a daughter, Toshi, a musician, from her marriage to Cordell, which ended in 1967. She is a specialist in African-American oral history, performance and protest traditions. Her work as a folklorist, scholar and curator at the Smithsonian over the course of 20 years led to studies of African-American family histories and the evolution of the spiritual, and field research in the cultures of eight African nations. In 1989 she got the phone call from the MacArthur people.
"I'd been taping revival meetings in Georgia for three summers, and I was staying with my mother there," she recalled, "when the phone rings. "This is Ken Fisher, I'm with the MacArthur Foundation, and you have a MacArthur grant.'"
She used the five-year grant to continue her work in African-American sacred music traditions, which resulted in the 1994 production "Wade in the Water," a 26-hour radio series sponsored by the Smithsonian and National Public Radio. "Wade in the Water," which won the Peabody Award, also led to a show of the same title organized by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, a four-CD set of recordings on the Smithsonian Folkways label and the book, We'll Understand it Better By and By: Pioneering African-American Gospel Composers, published by Smithsonian Press.
The opening lyrics of “Ella’s Song,” written by Reagon, are drawn from the words and teachings of the great activist-organizer Ella Baker: “We who believe in freedom cannot rest.”
Lyrics:
We who believe in freedom cannot rest
We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes
Until the killing of black men, black mothers' sons
Is as important as the killing of white men, white mothers' sons
That which touches me most is that I had a chance to work with people
Passing on to others that which was passed on to me
To me young people come first, they have the courage where we fail
And if I can but shed some light as they carry us through the gale
Geoffrey Himes wrote about Reagon for The Washington Post, reviewing the release of “Sacred Ground” in 1995 in an article titled “Sweet Honey pours smooth harmonies”:
As Director of the Smithsonian Institution's landmark "Wade in the Water" project documenting the history of African American gospel music, Bernice Johnson Reagon often called upon her group, Sweet Honey in the Rock, to re-create the older styles for radio broadcasts and recordings. This experience drew Washington's female a cappella sextet back to its roots in religious music and led to the group's impressive new album, "Sacred Ground."
One song from the album featured very contemporary lyrics—and raises a question we still need to answer today:
The lyrics were written by Ysaye Barnwell:
Would you harbor me?
Would I harbor you?
Would you harbor me?
Would I harbor you?
[Chorus]
Would you harbor a Christian, a Muslim, a Jew?
A heretic, convict, or spy?
Would you harbor a runaway woman or child?
A poet, a prophet, a king?
Would you harbor an exile or a refugee?
A person living with AIDS?
Would you harbor a Tubman, a Garret, a Truth?
A fugitive or a slave?
Would you harbor a Haitian, Korean, or Czech?
A lesbian or a gay?
Feminist author and activist Barbara Smith published “Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology” in 1983, which is now available in an updated edition. Reagon’s essay in the book, titled “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century,” was written in the wake of a speech she delivered to a group of mostly white feminists at the West Coast Women's Music Festival in 1981, which was held in California's Yosemite National Forest. That essay is the source of the quotation I use as a sig line.
Journalist Nancy LeTourneau cited Reagon in Washington Monthly when talking about coalitions being built around Barack Obama. This also applies to where we are today, with the need for strong coalitions to elect Vice President Kamala Harris to the presidency:
In order to survive in this world with many peoples, we have to learn how to build coalitions.
Coalition work is not work done in your home. Coalition work has to be done in the streets. And it is some of the most dangerous work you can do. And you shouldn’t look for comfort. Some people will come to a coalition and they rate the success of the coalition on whether or not they feel good when they get there. They’re not looking for a coalition; they’re looking for a home! They’re looking for a bottle with some milk in it and a nipple, which does not happen in a coalition. You don’t get a lot of food in a coalition. You don’t get fed a lot in a coalition. In a coalition you have to give, and it is different from your home. You can’t stay there all the time. You go to the coalition for a few hours and then you go back and take your bottle wherever it is, and then you go back and coalesce some more.
It is very important not to confuse them—home and coalition.
She says that forming coalitions is a matter of life and death.
It must become necessary for all of us to feel that this is our world…And watch that “ours’ make it as big as you can—it ain’t got nothing to do with that barred room. The “our” must include everybody you have to include in order for you to survive. You must be sure you understand that you ain’t gonna be able to have an “our” that don’t include Bernice Johnson Reagon, cause I don’t plan to go nowhere! That’s why we have to have coalitions. Cause I ain’t gonna let you live unless you let me live. Now there’s danger in that, but there’s also the possibility that we can both live—if you can stand it.
I was thinking about a tribute Reagon paid to the late, great historian and activist Howard Zinn upon his passing in 2010:
Thank you, Sister Reagon. We hear you.
Join me in the comments section below for more, and please post your favorites from Reagon and Sweet Honey.
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