Bernice Johnson Reagon, a civil rights activist who co-founded The Freedom Singers and later started the African-American a cappella ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock, has died at the age of 81. Reagon's death was confirmed Wednesday night by Courtland Cox, the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's Legacy Project. 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 Dr.
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.
