Reagon, Bernice Johnson (1942–)

Bernice Johnson Reagon is a singer, musician, longtime social activist, an educator, folklorist, and historian of African and African American cultural traditions. Born Bernice Johnson, October 4, 1942, she came of age in Albany, Georgia, during the civil rights movement. As a student at Albany State College, she was arrested during a freedom march and led singing in the jail. With roots deep in the musical traditions of the African American Church, she became an early member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Freedom Singers and gave her voice and talents to the movement. During the late 1960s, she also toured southern campuses with the Southern Folk Cultural Revival Project. Its Southern Folk Festivals, codirected with Anne Romaine, brought together diverse musical traditions with grassroots performers from across the South, including Mabel Hillary, Rev. Pearly Brown, Ralph Stanley, Elizabeth Cotton, and Doc Watson. She was also a founding member in 1966 of the Harambee Singers, an Atlanta, Georgia–based a cappella group that performed songs from the African and African American music traditions.

She received a bachelor's in history from Spelman College in 1970 and a doctorate in history from Howard University in 1975. She may be best known through the a cappella African American women's singing group Sweet Honey in the Rock, which she founded in 1973, and which has brought African and African American music to venues around the world through multiple albums, tapes, and CDs. She also worked as a program director and curator for the Smithsonian Institution from 1974 to 1993. While there, she helped create, research, and host the National Public Radio program, Wade in the Water: African American Sacred Music Traditions, which won a Peabody Award. She also curated the Smithsonian traveling exhibit by the same title. Since 1993, she has been curator emeritus at the Smithsonian.

From 1993 to 2002, Reagon was professor of history at American University. She served during the 2002–2003 academic year as the William and Camille Cosby Professor in the Fine Arts at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia.

Reagon has composed and performed music and consulted on the production of a number of film and television projects, including Eyes on the Prize, the award-winning series on the civil rights movement by the late Henry Hampton of Blackside Productions; the PBS Emmy-winning production by the Ginger Group, We Shall Overcome; and the PBS programs on the Underground Railroad and on Frederick Douglass. In 1992, she was the focus of a PBS/60 Minutes Bill Moyers special, The Songs Are Free: Bernice Johnson Reagon With Bill Moyers.

Among Reagon's numerous publications and productions are We Who Believe in Freedom, We'll Understand It Better By and By, Voices of the Civil Rights Movement (a two-CD set with booklet), and a collection of essays, If You Don't Go, Don't Hinder Me.

She produced most of the Sweet Honey in the Rock recordings and a number of solo recordings, including “Give Your Hands to Struggle” and “River of Life.” She collaborated with her musician-daughter Toshi Reagon and composer Jeri Allen on the score for the film, Beah: A Black Woman Speaks, a Black History Month selection by Home Box Office.

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