Bernice Johnson Reagon, a founder of The Freedom Singers and Sweet Honey in the Rock, has died (2024)

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Bernice Johnson Reagon, seen here at the memorial celebration for Odetta at Riverside Church in 2009 in New York City. Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images hide caption

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

Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images

Bernice Johnson Reagon, a civil rights activist who co-founded The Freedom Singers and later started the African American vocal ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock, died Tuesday at the age of 81.

Her daughter, the acclaimed musician Toshi Reagon, shared the news of her mother's passing Wednesday night in a public Facebook post.

It is impossible to separate liberation struggles from song. And in the 1960s — at marches, and in jailhouses — the voice leading those songs was often Bernice Johnson Reagon. Her work as a scholar and activist continued throughout her life, in universities and concert halls, at protests and in houses of worship.

The future songleader was born in southwest Georgia, the daughter of a Baptist minister. She was admitted to a historically Black public college, Albany State, at the age of 16 and studied music. Albany, Ga., would become an important center of the civil rights movement when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested there in 1962, causing the media to descend on the town.

Reagon, however, wasn't there to see it. "I was already in jail, so I missed most of that," she wryly remembered on WHYY's Fresh Air in 1988. "But what they began to write about ... no matter what the article said, they talked about singing."

The singing that so fascinated the media were freedom songs — often revamped versions of spirituals familiar to anyone who'd grown up in African American churches. Reagon would later say that, in many cases, she simply replaced the word "Jesus" with "freedom," as in the rousing "Woke Up This Morning."

After Albany State kicked her out due to her arrest, the rising civil rights organizer co-founded The Freedom Singers, an a cappella group that was part of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC. Through music, the Freedom Singers chronicled SNCC's activities, including a movement leader's funeral ("They Laid Medgar Evers In His Grave") and a visit from a Kenyan dignitary brought in by the State Department to demonstrate America's strides toward racial integration ("Oginga Odinga").

Such intertwining of songs and resistance helped define the era and those who fought for equality, says civil rights professor Kevin Gaines.

"When they were being arrested and loaded into the paddy wagons, when they were in jail, when they were having mass meetings in African American churches to organize the next protest, civil rights activists sang in all of those settings," says Gaines.

Reagon remembered, on Fresh Air, that being the good kind of troublemaker was not necessarily encouraged.

"If you grow up in a Black family, the best badge you can have is that you never got into trouble with the law," she said. But she drew a parallel between the struggle for civil rights and biblical stories like those of Paul and Silas, who were jailed for their ministry.

"When you're in the civil rights movement, that's the first time you establish yourself in a relationship that's pretty close to the same relationship that used to get the Christians thrown in the lion's den," she said. "And so, for the first time, those old songs you understand in a way that nobody could ever teach you."

In 1963, Bernice Johnson married Freedom Singers co-founder Cordell Reagon. They had two children, Kwan Tauna and Toshi, who would go on to become a musical star in her own right. After her 1967 divorce, Reagon returned to school, received a Ford Foundation Fellowship, and founded the women's a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock.

Her activism grew to encompass the anti-apartheid movement. She became a leading scholar of Black musical life. In 1974, she received a music history appointment at the Smithsonian; a year later, she added the title of Dr. after receiving a Ph.D. from Howard University; in 1989, she won a "genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation. In 1994, she created a 26-part NPR documentary called Wade in the Waterthat won a Peabody award. And in 1995, she was awarded the Presidential Medal and the Charles Frankel Prize.

Wade in the Waterwas a listener's guide to African American sacred music — one that celebrated the ways in which both worship and liberation are sacred.