“The movement taught me that singing is not just about entertainment. It’s about survival, identity, and expression of power.”
–Bernice Johnson Reagon
When Bernice Johnson Reagon, the founder of the beloved Black female a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock, passed away in July, the world lost a signature voice. Throughout her life Bernice used her voice as an expression of power. She was a longtime friend and Children’s Defense Fund champion, including hosting benefit concerts for CDF, and when over 200,000 parents, grandparents, child advocates, religious leaders, and others of every race, age, faith, and discipline from all walks of life gathered together for the 1996 Stand for Children rally at the Lincoln Memorial, she led us all in song. A constant thread throughout her life was showing and teaching others what it meant to be a song leader.
She grew up in a close-knit community in Albany, Georgia, where her father was a pastor, surrounded by extended family and immersed in the Black church and Black culture – and intuitively aware of how central music was to both. As she said: “Growing up in Albany, I learned that if you bring Black people together, you bring them together with a song.” She went to Albany State College to study music, but as the Civil Rights Movement and student activism were rising across the South, she was also ready to act. She first joined the Albany wing of the NAACP Youth Council. Then, when Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) members Charles Sherrod and Cordell Reagon came to Albany State in the fall of 1961 to recruit members, she joined SNCC and quickly became a leader in the Albany Movement. At local protests and marches she was often the one called on to lead the group in song, and this was a precursor to her role as a founding member of the SNCC Freedom Singers – the first landmark in her lifelong call to share her gift and use music as a tool for activism and social change.
As a member of the original SNCC Freedom Singers quartet, along with Cordell, she toured the country performing at rallies, churches, and marches, and raising money for the Civil Rights Movement. She and Cordell married during this time, and had their children Kwan and Toshi before their divorce. She was expelled from Albany State for her activism, but would go on to finish her undergraduate degree at Spelman College and earn a doctorate in history from Howard University, becoming a university professor and a cultural historian in music history at the Smithsonian. The Smithsonian collection Wade in the Water: African American Sacred Music Traditions is one of her masterpieces. And of course, as founder of the Freedom Singers, the Harambee Singers, and finally Sweet Honey in the Rock, she made music history herself.
In the documentary Eyes on the Prize, she explained just what it meant to her to be a song leader as she described what happened after she was arrested during the Albany movement and joined other protesters in jail: “Slater King, who was already in jail, said, ‘Bernice, is that you?’ And I said yes. And he said, ‘Sing a song’. . . The singing tradition in Albany was congregational. There were no soloists; there were song leaders. If Slater said, ‘Bernice, sing a song,’ he wasn’t asking for a solo; he was asking me to plant a seed. The minute you start the song, the song is created by everybody there. There is really almost a musical explosion.”
Rev. Shannon Daley-Harris shared a sermon on that theme at a women’s spiritual retreat at CDF’s Alex Haley Farm as she reminded us that we, too, are called to be song leaders and not soloists as we do our part to engage others in the struggle for justice. Rev. Daley-Harris also highlighted this quote and message in her own book Hope for the Future: Answering God’s Call to Justice for Our Children, and added this passage from the same interview: “The voice I have now I got the first time I sang in a movement meeting, after I got out of jail. I did the song, ‘Over My Head I See Freedom in the Air,’ but I had never heard that voice before. I had never been that me before. And once I became that me, I have never let that me go . . . They could not stop our sound. They would have to kill us to stop us from singing. Sometimes the police would plead and say, ‘Please stop singing.’ And you would just know that your word was being heard, and you felt joy. There was a way in which those songs kept us from being touched by people who would want us not to be who we were becoming.”
Bernice Johnson Reagon never stopped being a song leader for equality and justice, and her voice never stopped inspiring others to join her and become who they were meant to be in the same struggle. It will always remain her legacy.