Bernice Johnson Reagon, a founding father of The Freedom Singers and Candy Honey within the Rock, has died

Bernice Johnson Reagon, seen right here on the memorial celebration for Odetta at Riverside Church in 2009 in New York Metropolis. Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Photographs conceal caption

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Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Photographs

Bernice Johnson Reagon, seen right here on the memorial celebration for Odetta at Riverside Church in 2009 in New York Metropolis.

Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Photographs

Bernice Johnson Reagon, a civil rights activist who co-founded The Freedom Singers and later began the African-American vocal ensemble Candy Honey within the Rock, died Tuesday on the age of 81.

Her daughter, the acclaimed musician Toshi Reagon, shared the information of her mom’s passing Wednesday evening in a public Fb submit.

It’s not possible to separate liberation struggles from tune. And within the Nineteen Sixties — at marches, and in jailhouses — the voice main these songs was typically Bernice Johnson Reagon. Her work as a scholar and activist continued all through her life, in universities and live performance halls, at protests and in homes of worship.

The longer term songleader was born in southwest Georgia, the daughter of a Baptist minister. She was admitted to a traditionally Black public school, Albany State, on the age of 16 and studied music. Albany, Ga., would develop into an essential middle of the civil rights motion when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested there in 1962, inflicting the media to descend in town.

Reagon, nevertheless, wasn’t there to see it. “I used to be already in jail, so I missed most of that,” she wryly remembered on WHYY’s Contemporary Air in 1988. “However what they started to write down about… it doesn’t matter what the article stated, they talked about singing.”

The singing that so fascinated the media had been freedom songs — typically revamped variations of spirituals acquainted to anybody who’d grown up in African-American church buildings. Reagon would later say that in lots of instances, she merely changed the phrase “Jesus” with “freedom,” as within the rousing “Woke Up This Morning.”

After Albany State kicked her out as a consequence of her arrest, the rising civil rights organizer co-founded The Freedom Singers, an a cappella group that was a part of the Pupil Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC. Via music, the Freedom Singers chronicled SNCC’s actions, together with a motion chief’s funeral (“They Laid Medgar Evers In His Grave“) and a go to from a Kenyan dignitary introduced in by the State Division to show America’s strides in the direction of racial integration (“Oginga Odinga“).

Such intertwining of songs and resistance helped outline the period and people who fought for equality, says civil rights professor Kevin Gaines.

“Once they had been being arrested and loaded into the paddywagons, after they had been in jail, after they had been having mass conferences in African-American church buildings to arrange the subsequent protest, civil rights activists sang in all of these settings,” says Gaines.

Reagon remembered, on Contemporary Air, that being the nice form of troublemaker was not essentially inspired.

“In the event you develop up in a black household, the very best badge you possibly can have is that you simply by no means acquired into bother with the regulation,” she stated. However she drew a parallel between the battle for civil rights and biblical tales like these of Paul and Silas, who had been jailed for his or her ministry.

“While you’re within the civil rights motion, that is the primary time you identify your self in a relationship that is fairly near the identical relationship that used to get the Christians thrown within the lion’s den,” she stated. “And so, for the primary time, these previous songs you perceive in a manner that no one might ever train you.”

In 1963, Bernice Johnson married Freedom Singers co-founder Cordell Reagon. They’d two kids, Kwan Tauna and Toshi, who would go on to develop into a musical star in her personal proper. After her 1967 divorce, Reagon returned to highschool, obtained a Ford Basis Fellowship, and based the ladies’s a cappella group Candy Honey within the Rock.

Her activism grew to embody the anti-apartheid motion. She grew to become a number one scholar of Black musical life. In 1974, she obtained a music historical past appointment on the Smithsonian; a 12 months later, she added the title of Dr. after receiving a Ph.D. from Howard College; in 1989 she gained a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Basis. In 1994, she created a 26 half NPR documentary referred to as Wade within the Water that gained a Peabody award. And in 1995, she was awarded the Presidential Medal and the Charles E. Frankel Prize.

Wade within the Water was a listener’s information to African American sacred music — one which celebrated the methods during which each worship and liberation are sacred.