The Freedom Singers started in Georgia, as part of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC. It was the early 1960s, and singing and marching together was a way to address segregation and racism. It turned out to be the most effective tactic to raise morale and communicate the struggle.
With her strong alto voice, Bernice Johnson Reagon led a quartet in a time of sit-ins at counters and the street, all of which led to beatings, arrests and jail time.
“The biggest thing I had to overcome was this voice inside that said 'if you do this you’ll kill yourself, you'll get killed'…and stepping across that inner voice was traumatic for me and I discovered if you don’t cross that line you never meet yourself," Reagon said a 2003 Smithsonian Folkways interview.
Reagon was jailed, and her college kicked her out for her arrest, but that didn't stop activism from become her life’s work. She continued to study, earning her undergraduate degree from Spelman College. She was granted a Ford Foundation Fellowship at Howard University, where Reagon received her doctorate.
Reagon became a leading scholar of freedom songs. She produced an audio series called Voices from the Civil Rights Movement for the Smithsonian Institution. Reagon also directed their program in Black American Culture while serving as curator of music history for the National Museum of American History.
After leaving the Freedom Singers, Reagon founded Georgia-based Harambee Singers and later the three-time Grammy-nominated acapella group - Sweet Honey in the Rock, which continues the tradition of protest-style singing to this day.
Reagon also produced the Peabody award-winning NPR series called, Wade in the Water - African American Sacred Music Traditions.
She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1989 and received a Folk Alliance International Lifetime Achievement Award in 1999. In 2003, Reagon was honored with a prestigious Heinz Award.
Bernice Johnson Reagon became a professor emerita of history at American University, a scholar-in-residence at Stanford, and was granted an honorary doctorate from the Berklee College of Music. She died in July at the age of 81.
