Honoring Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon

Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon was a song leader, composer, scholar, and activist who, in the early 1960s, was a founding member of the Freedom Singers, organized by the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the Albany Movement in Georgia.

After being suspended from Albany State for her activism, she briefly attended Spelman College. Bernice dropped out to tour with the Freedom Singers hitting the road in a Buick station wagon, raising money for SNCC. The group performed throughout the Deep South singing at churches, concert halls, college campuses and coffee houses. In 1970 she returned to Spelman to finish her bachelor’s degree. Moving to Washington, DC, she received her PhD from Howard University in 1975.

In 1973 Bernice founded Sweet Honey in the Rock, an all-female, all-Black a cappella group. Sweet Honey toured the world, recording 27 albums, three of which received Grammy nominations. She worked as a curator at the Smithsonian Institution and served on the advisory committee of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Dr. Reagon received a MacArthur “genius” grant in 1989 and was honored by President Bill Clinton with the Charles Frankel Prize in the Humanities in 1995.

Bernice Johnson Reagon was 81 years old.

Photo: Journal of Gospel Music

Dr. Bernice Reagon, Howard Zinn, Joan Baez and Odetta “I was a student leader of the beginning freedom movement in Albany. I was suspended from Albany State College and received a scholarship, a full scholarship, to continue my studies at Spelman in Atlanta. Howard Zinn was on the faculty there, and Howard and Roz Zinn took me to my first folk singing concert. It was Joan Baez. And at that time, I had heard about folk music. There was the hootenanny. And so, I liked Joan Baez. Then they said, “We want you to come to another folk singing concert, and the singer is wonderful. Her name is Odetta.” I said, “Odetta what?” And they said, “She just goes by the name Odetta.” So she sang at the gym at Morehouse College, spring 1962. And I’m sitting there, and out on the stage comes this Black woman. Her hair was cut in a short afro. She had a guitar … I thought I had died and gone to heaven.” — Bernice Johnson Reagon, Democracy Now interview by Amy Goodman, 12/30/2008, edited

Sources: I am grateful to these authors whose published works I summarized, paraphrased or quoted directly. Jodi Guglielmi. “Bernice Johnson Reagon, civil rights activist and founder of Sweet Honey in the Rock, dead at 81.” Rolling Stone, 7/17/2024; Harrison Smith. “Bernice Johnson Reagon, civil rights activist.” Washington Post, 7/18/2024; Wikipedia. – Friday’s Labor Folklore, Saul Schniderman, editor.