We misplaced an enormous this month. Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon, civil rights activist, songwriter, ethnomusicologist, writer, and founding father of musical ensemble Sweet Honey In The Rock, joined the ancestors on July 16 at the age of 81.
She might not have been a family identify, however I might have had a tough time getting by means of many occasions which have taken place in my life with out the power she gave to me and others round me, imparted by her songs and the ability of her voice.
Music performs a key position in each private and political struggles. It heals, uplifts, builds bridges, makes sorrow bearable, motivates, and conjures up. Dr. Reagon knew that and lived it throughout her 60-year profession.
For a few years as an activist, I’ve used one of her quotes as my signature. It epitomizes my ideas, beliefs, observe, and objectives:
“In the event you’re in a coalition and also you’re snug, it isn’t a broad sufficient coalition.”
I described what I felt about that quote in 2009, a few 12 months after I arrived right here at Day by day Kos. My emotions haven’t modified. I bless her reminiscence immediately and on a regular basis.
”Black Music Sunday” is a weekly collection highlighting all issues Black music, with over 220 tales masking performers, genres, historical past, and extra, every that includes its personal vibrant soundtrack. I hope you’ll discover some acquainted tunes and maybe an introduction to one thing new.
Bernice Johnson Reagon was born Bernice Johnson on October 4th, 1942 simply exterior of Albany, Georgia. Her dad and mom, Beatrice and Reverend Jessie Johnson, raised Reagon and her siblings throughout the city’s intently linked African American neighborhood. Reagon describes this expertise as “being raised by a complete neighborhood of individuals” slightly than solely by her dad and mom (Reagon 1986). She recollects dwelling in shut proximity to her kin’ properties. Reagon’s education began younger, and she or he was in fourth grade by the point she was seven years outdated. Following main faculty, she and her siblings attended an all-Black highschool.
Regardless of the ever-present racism that prevailed within the South, Reagon was in a position to set up a robust sense of self within the face of essentially the most difficult odds. Her father’s position as a reverend in an all-Black church and her childhood in a primarily Black neighborhood ensured Reagon was introduced up in an surroundings filled with Black music and traditions. Her surroundings allowed her to continually study extra about her tradition. Heavy engagement together with her neighborhood was a big issue within the ardour she developed for Black id and heritage.
In 1959, Reagon attended Albany State Faculty (now Albany State College) the place she majored in music. She additionally started to take an curiosity in activism and political organizing . Her curiosity totally took form when she joined the Scholar Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in addition to the Nationwide Affiliation for Coloured Individuals (NAACP). Throughout her time with every group, she assisted in “voter registration drives and anti-segregation protests” (People Who Inform The Fact, n.d.). These duties had been central to the Albany Motion, because the marketing campaign’s leaders aimed to handle the dearth of Albany’s Black residents registered to vote and town’s refusal to desegregate (SNCC Digital Gateway 2021). The Motion additionally hosted workshops on maintain peaceable demonstrations. To additional their efforts, the Motion’s leaders additionally recruited native college students to partake within the desegregation initiatives.
The SNCC Digiital Gateway web site continues her story:
Johnson was suspended from Albany State for her activism. She spent a semester at Spelman Faculty in Atlanta earlier than becoming a member of SNCC’s newly-formed Freedom Singers in 1962. She married the group’s co-founder Cordell Reagon. The Freedom Singers toured the nation to raise money for SNCC projects within the Deep South. The group additionally moved out and in of motion hotspots, utilizing their music to supply a spark for native activism. “Principally the singing was the ‘mattress’ and the ‘air’ of all the pieces,” remembered Johnson. “I had by no means heard or felt singing do this on that degree of energy.”
In 1966, Johnson Reagon based the Harambee Singers and in 1973, she fashioned Candy Honey within the Rock, an all-women, African American a cappella group that sought to impact change and painting the Black expertise by means of their voices. Johnson Reagon continued to make use of her highly effective singing to permit others to review the African American oral custom in radio, movie, and concert events throughout the nation.
Reagon talked with Smithsonian Folkways about how she needed to face her personal fears with a view to discover freedom.
Many individuals who attended the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on Aug. 28, 1963, had been launched to the SNCC Freedom Singers for the primary time. Reagon was a member.
“I awoke this morning with my thoughts stayed on freedom” is a lyric from the Freedom Singers that highlights dedication and perseverance
Recorded dwell on the Newport People Competition, on July 26, 1963; The Freedom Singers: Bernice Johnson, Rutha Harris, Cordell Hull Reagon and Charles Neblitt. No folk-song pattern of the previous few years aroused a lot consideration as the usage of “freedom songs” within the Negro civil rights motion. That is most likely the best peacetime useful use of people music because the labor motion organizing drive within the 1930’s. Their “freedom songs” are outdated spirituals with renewed that means for immediately, both of their authentic kind or with new phrases. They’re heard in jails, and at sit-ins, demonstrations, rallies and all rigidity factors the place morale wants a lift.
4 younger activist on this battle make up The Freedom Singers – Bernice Johnson, Rutha Harris, Cordell Hull Reagon and Charles Neblitt. The group fashioned within the winter of 1962 throughout the prolonged civil rights battles at Albany, Georgia, the place music performed a significant position in buoying up the spirits of the demonstrators. That is most likely the one musical quartet all members of which have served time in jail. “Woke Up This Morning With My Thoughts Set On Freedom” is a well-liked trendy gospel tune with revised phrases and one of the crucial in style of the brand new “freedom songs.” ~ Stacey Williams (from the liner notes)
Many years later, President Barack Obama celebrated their music.
On February 9, 2010, throughout Washington, D.C.’s worst snow storm on file, President Obama and the First Household joined Vp Joe Biden, Cupboard members and different particular visitors, in addition to college students from across the nation, to commemorate Black Historical past Month with “In Efficiency on the White Home: A Celebration of Music from the Civil Rights Motion.”
In 1965, Reagon recorded “Folk Songs: The South” for Smithsonian Folkways Information.
I used to be dwelling in Washington, D.C., in 1975, working to construct the primary minority-controlled public radio station, WPFW-FM Pacifica, once I heard Reagon’s Paradon Information album, “Give Your Hands to Struggle.”
The hair on my arms stood up whereas listening to her rendition of the gospel tune “Outdated Ship of Zion”:
The title tune, “Give Your Fingers to Wrestle,” opens with a call to take action
In the event you see me stumble,
Don’t stand again and look on.
Attain out, now, brother.
Give your fingers to battle.
We had been blessed to have Candy Honey come to the radio station to file a number of public service bulletins and be interviewed on our ladies’s music program.
Journalist Michael Kernan profiled Reagon and her birthing of Candy Honey In The Rock for Smithsonian Journal in 1999 in “Conveying History Through Song”:
In Washington, whereas she was attending Howard College, she turned vocal director of the D.C. Black Repertory Firm, based by actor Robert Hooks. Working with 20 to 30 voices and eight or 9 concord traces made the restrictions of three- or four-part concord unsatisfactory, she says, which led her to the tough five-part sound of Candy Honey In The Rock.
Thus, there are 5 singers in Candy Honey, producing a classy sound that’s way more advanced than the standard quartet. Over time the personnel has modified, for the singers have all the time by necessity labored part-time, and a few 22 ladies have been members because the founding in 1973. Candy Honey has carried out in Africa and Canada, however principally it covers the USA, from Maine to California, with greater than 60 concert events a 12 months, normally offered out weeks upfront. However Candy Honey is just a part of the story. Reagon has a grown son, Kwan, a prepare dinner, and a daughter, Toshi, a musician, from her marriage to Cordell, which resulted in 1967. She is a specialist in African-American oral historical past, efficiency and protest traditions. Her work as a folklorist, scholar and curator on the Smithsonian over the course of 20 years led to research of African-American household histories and the evolution of the non secular, and discipline analysis within the cultures of eight African nations. In 1989 she bought the telephone name from the MacArthur individuals.
“I might been taping revival conferences in Georgia for 3 summers, and I used to be staying with my mom there,” she recalled, “when the telephone rings. “That is Ken Fisher, I am with the MacArthur Basis, and you’ve got a MacArthur grant.'”
She used the five-year grant to proceed her work in African-American sacred music traditions, which resulted within the 1994 manufacturing “Wade within the Water,” a 26-hour radio collection sponsored by the Smithsonian and Nationwide Public Radio. “Wade within the Water,” which received the Peabody Award, additionally led to a present of the identical title organized by the Smithsonian Establishment Touring Exhibition Service, a four-CD set of recordings on the Smithsonian Folkways label and the guide, We’ll Perceive it Higher By and By: Pioneering African-American Gospel Composers, printed by Smithsonian Press.
The opening lyrics of “Ella’s Tune,” written by Reagon, are drawn from the phrases and teachings of the nice activist-organizer Ella Baker: “We who imagine in freedom can not relaxation.”
We who imagine in freedom can not relaxation
We who imagine in freedom can not relaxation till it comes
Till the killing of black males, black moms’ sons
Is as vital because the killing of white males, white moms’ sons
That which touches me most is that I had an opportunity to work with individuals
Passing on to others that which was handed on to me
To me younger individuals come first, they’ve the braveness the place we fail
And if I can however shed some mild as they carry us by means of the gale
Geoffrey Himes wrote about Reagon for The Washington Publish, reviewing the discharge of “Sacred Floor” in 1995 in an article titled “Sweet Honey pours smooth harmonies”:
As Director of the Smithsonian Establishment’s landmark “Wade within the Water” venture documenting the historical past of African American gospel music, Bernice Johnson Reagon typically referred to as upon her group, Candy Honey within the Rock, to re-create the older types for radio broadcasts and recordings. This expertise drew Washington’s feminine a cappella sextet again to its roots in non secular music and led to the group’s spectacular new album, “Sacred Floor.”
One tune from the album featured very up to date lyrics—and raises a query we nonetheless must reply immediately:
The lyrics had been written by Ysaye Barnwell:
Would you harbor me?
Would I harbor you?
Would you harbor me?
Would I harbor you?
[Chorus]
Would you harbor a Christian, a Muslim, a Jew?
A heretic, convict, or spy?
Would you harbor a runaway girl or baby?
A poet, a prophet, a king?
Would you harbor an exile or a refugee?
An individual dwelling with AIDS?
Would you harbor a Tubman, a Garret, a Fact?
A fugitive or a slave?
Would you harbor a Haitian, Korean, or Czech?
A lesbian or a homosexual?
Feminist writer and activist Barbara Smith printed “Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology” in 1983, which is now out there in an up to date version. Reagon’s essay within the guide, titled “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century,” was written within the wake of a speech she delivered to a gaggle of principally white feminists on the West Coast Girls’s Music Competition in 1981, which was held in California’s Yosemite Nationwide Forest. That essay is the supply of the citation I take advantage of as a sig line.
Journalist Nancy LeTourneau cited Reagon in Washington Monthly when speaking about coalitions being constructed round Barack Obama. This additionally applies to the place we’re immediately, with the necessity for robust coalitions to elect Vice President Kamala Harris to the presidency:
With a view to survive on this world with many peoples, we now have to discover ways to construct coalitions.
Coalition work is just not work executed in your house. Coalition work must be executed within the streets. And it’s a number of the most harmful work you are able to do. And also you shouldn’t search for consolation. Some individuals will come to a coalition they usually price the success of the coalition on whether or not or not they really feel good after they get there. They’re not in search of a coalition; they’re in search of a house! They’re in search of a bottle with some milk in it and a nipple, which doesn’t occur in a coalition. You don’t get a number of meals in a coalition. You don’t get fed loads in a coalition. In a coalition you must give, and it’s totally different from your own home. You’ll be able to’t keep there on a regular basis. You go to the coalition for a number of hours and you then return and take your bottle wherever it’s, and you then return and coalesce some extra.
It is rather vital to not confuse them—residence and coalition.
She says that forming coalitions is a matter of life and loss of life.
It should turn out to be crucial for all of us to really feel that that is our world…And watch that “ours’ make it as massive as you possibly can—it ain’t bought nothing to do with that barred room. The “our” should embrace everyone you must embrace so as so that you can survive. You have to be positive you perceive that you just ain’t gonna be capable to have an “our” that don’t embrace Bernice Johnson Reagon, trigger I don’t plan to go nowhere! That’s why we now have to have coalitions. Trigger I ain’t gonna allow you to dwell except you let me dwell. Now there’s hazard in that, however there’s additionally the likelihood that we are able to each dwell—when you can stand it.
I used to be fascinated with a tribute Reagon paid to the late, nice historian and activist Howard Zinn upon his passing in 2010:
Thanks, Sister Reagon. We hear you.
Be part of me within the feedback part under for extra, and please submit your favorites from Reagon and Candy Honey.
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