“Growing up in Albany, I learned that if you bring Black people together, you bring them together with a song. To this day, I don’t understand how people think they can bring anybody together without a song.”
—Bernice Johnson Reagon, 1996
We honor and celebrate the life and light that Bernice Johnson Reagon had in the world. Reagon (October 4, 1942 – July 16, 2024) was an influential songtalker, composer, scholar, and activist. Her biography is as rich as her musicality. She is most widely known as an organizer of Sweet Honey in the Rock, which performed for more than four decades. But as her biography notes:
For more than half a century, Bernice Johnson Reagon has been a major cultural voice for freedom and justice; singing, teaching — speaking out against racism and organized inequities of all kinds. A child of Southwest Georgia, an African American woman’s voice, born in the struggle against racism in America during the Civil Rights Movement of the 50s and 60s. Reagon’s life and work supports the concept of community-based culture with an enlarged capacity for mutual respect: for self, for those who move among us who seem to be different than us, respect and care for our home, the environment — including the planet that sustains life as we know it.
Howard Zinn wrote about Bernice Johnson Reagon in his autobiography You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train in Chapter 4, “‘My Name Is Freedom’: Albany, Georgia”:
The people I encountered in Albany in those days made me think of what stored-up courage and self-sacrifice one finds in so many people who never make the headlines but represent millions.
VOICES OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT: The program cover of the 1980 conference organized by Bernice Johnson Reagon and the accompanying album LP.
Sources: Howard Zinn Papers, New York University Tamiment Library; Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.
In February of 1979, Reagon invited Zinn to participate in a conference that would be known as the “Voices of the Civil Rights Movement: A National Conference on the Civil Rights Movement Culture” held January 31–February 3, 1980. In a letter archived at the Howard Zinn Papers at New York University’s Tamiment Library, Reagon wrote, “I would appreciate your immediate comments and suggestions on the proposed conference, as well as your commitment to be an active participant.” Zinn would participate on the “Activist Communities” panel with Diane Nash and Reverend Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker.
Watch clips of her singing and sharing her appreciation for Zinn. Learn more about Reagon’s life at the SNCC Digital Gateway.
