musician, curator, historian, writer and civil rights activist
Born in Albany, Georgia, on October 4, 1942, the third of eight children, Bernice Johnson was nurtured on African-American sacred music in her father╒s Baptist church. She was influenced early on by her father╒s singing style and his connection to their community. After enrolling at Albany State College in 1959 as a music major, where she studied classical art song and arranged spirituals, she became the highest-ranking student at the school and changed her major to biology.
Johnson╒s first political activities were in student government and at the local NAACP Youth Chapter. When members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) came to Albany, she was drawn to their tactics and marched in a 1961 protest which caused her to be suspended from school and to be arrested. Still, she remembered being moved ╥by the hundreds and thousands of people in the streets. I was moved by hearing songs, and after hearing them all my life, for the first time, I understood what they meant.╙
In 1962, Johnson returned to her music studies at Spelman College in Atlanta, but left the same year to join the SNCC Freedom Singers. The group sang at political meetings and jails, drew attention to voter registration, raised money for the movement and also appeared at the 1963 March on Washington. She married Cordell Reagon, an SNCC field worker and Freedom Singer. In 1964 she left the Freedom Singers to have her first child, her daughter Toshi, who would become an accomplished musician in her own right. She later separated from her husband while pregnant with her son, Kwan; they were divorced in 1967. Reagon╒s first of several solo albums was released in 1966; her second was recorded in 1967: while she raised her children, she researched traditional African-American songs and stories, and organized folk festival tours that featured both African-American and white musicians.
Following this period, Reagon moved away from integrationist politics toward a more separatist stance; she wrote some of her most militant songs as a member of the Harambee Singers. After completing a degree in non-Western history at Spelman, she moved to Washington, D.C. and became the vocal director of the D.C. Black Repertory Theater. She formed the singing group Sweet Honey in the Rock from members of this company in 1972.
Sweet Honey in the Rock consisted variously of four to six women, including Reagon, performing a cappella music, ranging from traditional folk, African chant, field hollers, and Baptist hymns to the blues, jazz, and rap music. With its unique sound, the group continued to address political and personal issues, recorded many albums and performed at churches, concerts, and festivals all over the U.S. and around the world. In 1985, they coordinated the closing cultural festivities for the United Nations Decade for Women Conference in Nairobi, Kenya, and, in May of 1989, they performed to a sold-out audience at Carnegie Hall.
During the first years with Sweet Honey in the Rock, Reagon also earned a Ph.D. in history at Howard University and began working at the Smithsonian Institution as a cultural historian in the Division of Performing Arts/African Diaspora Project. Her research resulted in her article entitled ╥African Diaspora Women: The Making of Cultural Workers╙. Later she was promoted to curator of the National Museum of American History where she served as the director of the Smithsonian╒s program in black American culture. Her projects there included a three-record collection called Voices of the Civil Rights Movement: Black American Freedom Songs 1960-66 and the ╥Wade in the Water╙ Series, a long-term project focusing on the history of African-American sacred song and worship traditions. The series was inaugurated in 1992 with a book on pioneers of gospel music called We╒ll Understand It Better By and By and, a series of 26 programs, which aired on National Public Radio in January of 1994. To help fund the project, she used some of the funds from her 1989 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.
Her life and work embody her vision of herself as stated in a 1980 interview: ╥My identity is Black, woman, singer, historian, mother╤all of these things. And I feel it is most important to demand that this society give me the space to be all of those things ╔ A major part of my struggle is that human beings ought to be invited to try out their complexities and not be forced to give these narrow concepts of themselves.╙
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