Bernice Johnson Reagon, whose powerful voice helped propel the Civil Rights Movement, has died

NASHVILLE, Tennessee — Bernice Johnson Reagon, a musician and scholar who used her rich, powerful contralto voice in the service of the American civil rights movement and human rights struggles around the world, died on July 16, according to a social media post by her daughter. She was 81.

Reagon was perhaps best known as the founder of the internationally acclaimed African-American female a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock, which she led from 1973 until her retirement in 2004. The Grammy-nominated group’s mission is to educate and empower, as well as entertain. They perform songs from a wide range of genres, including spirituals, children’s songs, blues and jazz. Some of their original compositions honor American civil rights leaders and international liberation movements such as the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.

“She was incredible,” said Tammy Kernodle, a distinguished professor of music at Miami University who specializes in African-American music. She described Reagon as someone “whose divine energy, intellect and talent all come together in such a way that they create a change in the atmosphere.”

Reagon’s musical activism began in the early 1960s when she served as a field secretary for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and became an original member of the Freedom Singers, according to an obituary posted on social media by her daughter, musician Toshi Reagon. The group reunited and was joined by Toshi Reagon to perform for then-President Barack Obama in 2010 as part of a series of performances at the White House that were also televised nationally.

Born in Dougherty County outside Albany, Georgia, in 1942, Reagon attended music workshops in the early 1960s at Tennessee’s Highlander Folk School, a training center for activists. At an anniversary event in 2007, Reagon explained how the school helped her see her musical heritage as something special.

“From the time I was born, we were always singing,” Reagon said. “When you’re in a culture and you’re, quote, ‘doing what’s natural to you,’ you don’t pay attention to it. … I think my work as a cultural scholar, a singer, a composer would be completely different if I hadn’t had someone who had drawn my attention to the people who use songs to stay alive, or to hold themselves together, or to raise the energy in a movement.”

While attending Albany State College, Reagon was jailed for participating in a civil rights demonstration and expelled. She later graduated from Spellman College. She founded Sweet Honey in the Rock while a history major at Howard University and vocal director of the DC Black Repertory Company.

Reagon recorded her first solo album, “Folk Songs: The South,” on Folkways Records in 1965. In 1966, she became a founding member of the Atlanta-based Harambee Singers.

Reagon began working at the Smithsonian Institution in 1969, when she was invited to develop and curate a 1970 festival program, Black Music Through the Languages ​​​​of the New World, according to the Smithsonian. She went on to curate the African Diaspora Program and found and direct the Program in Black American Culture at the National Museum of American History, where she later served as curator emeritus. She produced and performed on numerous Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.

Reagon was a professor of history at American University in Washington for ten years, starting in 1993. He later became professor emeritus.

We assume that music has always been a part of civil rights activism, Kernodle said, but it was people like Reagon who made music “part of the strategy of nonviolent resistance. … They took those songs, they took those practices, from the church to the streets to the prison cells. And they universalized those songs.”

“What she also did, and what was very important, was she historicized how that music functioned in the civil rights movement,” Kernodle added. “Her dissertation was one of the first real studies of civil rights music.”

Reagon has received two George F. Peabody Awards, including for her work as principal investigator, conceptual producer and host of the Smithsonian Institution and National Public Radio series “Wade in the Water: African American Sacred Music Traditions.”

She has also received the Charles E. Frankel Prize, the Presidential Medal for outstanding contributions to the public understanding of the humanities, a MacArthur Fellows Program Award, and the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change Trumpet of Conscience Award.