Bernice Johnson Reagon, the civil rights activist and singer behind vocal teams just like the Freedom Singers and Candy Honey within the Rock, has died. She was 81.
Reagon’s daughter, the musician Toshi Reagon, introduced the loss of life in a public Fb publish.
The Georgia-born Reagon was born into a convention of faith-driven activism. The daughter of a Baptist minister, at 16 she studied music on the Georgia HBCU Albany State, within the metropolis the place the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. can be arrested in 1962, prompting nationwide outcry. Many observers famous that the civil rights motion was intertwined with the music traditions of Black church buildings within the South.
The Freedom Singers — Charles Neblett, Rutha Mae Harris, Cordell Reagon and Bernice Johnson Reagon — carry out circa 1963.
(Archive Photographs / Getty Photographs)
“If you’re within the civil rights motion, that’s the primary time you determine your self in a relationship that’s fairly near the identical relationship that used to get the Christians thrown within the lion’s den,” Reagon instructed Terry Gross in an interview. “And so, for the primary time, these previous songs you perceive in a manner that no person might ever educate you.”
Reagon co-founded the Freedom Singers, an a cappella group affiliated with the Scholar Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which practiced direct-action protests just like the Freedom Rides and sit-ins at segregated eating places. The Freedom Singers would doc the group’s ambitions and struggles in music, like on the stirring observe “They Laid Medgar Evers in His Grave.”
Bernice Johnson married Freedom Singers co-founder Cordell Reagon in 1963. That they had two kids, Kwan and Toshi, earlier than divorcing in 1967. Within the early ‘70s, she based Candy Honey within the Rock, a ladies’s a cappella group that may go on to obtain three Grammy nominations and create a large catalog of religious and issue-driven songs. The group’s membership was designed to evolve over time, and Reagon retired in 2004.
Reagon was additionally an institutional voice for the research of Black music traditions, serving for a few years as a professor in historical past at American College in Washington, D.C. By the Smithsonian, she curated a 1970 competition “Black Music By the Languages of the New World,” and in 1972, joined different students to construct the African Diaspora program. She additionally based and directed the Program in Black American Tradition on the Nationwide Museum of American Historical past.
In 1994, she oversaw the Peabody Award-winning, 26-part NPR documentary “Wade within the Water: African American Sacred Music Traditions.”
A few of her many honors in music and scholarship included a Ph.D. from Howard College, a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Basis and the Charles E. Frankel Prize, Presidential Medal, from the Nationwide Endowment for the Humanities.
Reagon is survived by her life associate, Adisa Douglas, kids Toshi Reagon and Kwan Reagon, a grandchild, Tashawn Nicole Reagon and quite a few relations.
