Bernice Johnson Reagon, Sweet Honey in the Rock vocalist and civil rights activist, dies at 81

Bernice Johnson Reagon, the civil rights activist and singer behind vocal groups like the Freedom Singers and Sweet Honey in the Rock, has died. She was 81.

Reagon’s daughter, the musician Toshi Reagon, announced the death in a public Facebook post.

The Georgia-born Reagon was born into a tradition of faith-driven activism. The daughter of a Baptist minister, at 16 she studied music at the Georgia HBCU Albany State, in the city where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. would be arrested in 1962, prompting national outcry. Many observers noted that the civil rights movement was intertwined with the song traditions of Black churches in the South.

The Freedom Singers — Charles Neblett, Rutha Mae Harris, Cordell Reagon and Bernice Johnson Reagon — perform circa 1963.

(Archive Photos / Getty Images)

“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,” Reagon told Terry Gross in an interview. “And so, for the first time, those old songs you understand in a way that nobody could ever teach you.”

Reagon co-founded the Freedom Singers, an a cappella group affiliated with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which practiced direct-action protests like the Freedom Rides and sit-ins at segregated restaurants. The Freedom Singers would document the group’s ambitions and struggles in song, like on the stirring track “They Laid Medgar Evers in His Grave.”

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Bernice Johnson married Freedom Singers co-founder Cordell Reagon in 1963. They had two children, Kwan and Toshi, before divorcing in 1967. In the early ‘70s, she founded Sweet Honey in the Rock, a women’s a cappella group that would go on to receive three Grammy nominations and create a wide catalog of spiritual and issue-driven songs. The group’s membership was designed to evolve over time, and Reagon retired in 2004.

Reagon was also an institutional voice for the study of Black music traditions, serving for many years as a professor in history at American University in Washington, D.C. Through the Smithsonian, she curated a 1970 festival “Black Music Through the Languages of the New World,” and in 1972, joined other scholars to build the African Diaspora program. She also founded and directed the Program in Black American Culture at the National Museum of American History.

In 1994, she oversaw the Peabody Award-winning, 26-part NPR documentary “Wade in the Water: African American Sacred Music Traditions.”

Some of her many honors in music and scholarship included a Ph.D. from Howard University, a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation and the Charles E. Frankel Prize, Presidential Medal, from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Reagon is survived by her life partner, Adisa Douglas, children Toshi Reagon and Kwan Reagon, a grandchild, Tashawn Nicole Reagon and numerous family members.