Biography
Early Life
Bernice Johnson was born in Southwest Georgia. She grew up in an African American community near Albany in Dougherty County. Her parents were Beatrice and Rev. Jesse Johnson. She grew up with African American sacred music in church. Singing and music surrounded her life as a young woman.
Organizing and Activism Through Music With SNCC
Bernice Johnson joined the NAACP Youth Council in Albany in 1959. She participated in efforts to get a white-owned drug store in a black neighborhood to hire black people. The effort was unsuccessful. The group still continued to focus on conditions in Albany. They collaborated with other organizations like the Lincoln Heights Improvement Association (LHIA).
Johnson was a student leader and activist in the student sit-ins in 1960 at Albany State College and was suspended for her activism.
She joined SNCC, (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) when SNCC field secretaries Charles Sherrod and Cordell Reagon started community organizing in Albany in 1961. The Albany Movement was formed after Bertha Gober and Blanton Hall were arrested for testing the desegregation of interstate buses and trains. Johnson was on the SNCC program committee, planning meetings and providing music.
She became a founding member of the original SNCC Freedom Singers with Cordell H. Reagon in 1962, singing alto. She married Reagon. The four-member Freedom Singers toured the Deep South to raise money for SNCC projects. Dr. Reagon’s work as a SNCC “Freedom Singer” combined organizing and singing as the group performed in concert halls, living rooms, elementary schools, etc. Dr. Reagon described the Freedom Singers as a “singing newspaper.” Songs mixed with stories conveyed the Civil Rights Movement struggles, said Dr. Reagan, “they became a major way for people who were not on the scene to feel the intensity of what was happening in the South.” She also said, “At the same time all this was happening, there was a folk song revival movement going on, so the commercial music industry was actually changed by the Civil Rights Movement.”
She graduated from Spelman College in Atlanta with a B.A. in History in 1970. Later, Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon earned her doctorate in U.S. history at Howard University with a concentration in African American Oral History in 1975.
Expanded Activism and Organizing Through Music
Johnson Reagon founded the Harambee Singers in 1966. In 1973, she founded Sweet Honey in the Rock, an African American women’s a cappella singing ensemble. She composed and produced a lot of the group’s repertoire. Much of her music draws upon her experiences as a black woman and as a SNCC organizer. Her music was influenced by her experiences growing up in the Civil Rights Movement. She was especially influenced by music of the Civil Rights Movement. She was vocal director for the DC Black Repertory Theater.
Dr. Reagon has been a scholar, activist, singer, composer, performer, writer, museum curator, and historian.
Dr. Reagon was professor of History at American University from 1993-2002. She was a folklorist Curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History from 1974-1993.
She was the William and Camille Cosby Chair of Fine Arts at Spelman College in Atlanta from 2002-2004.
Activism Through Film
Dr. Reagon was the conceptual producer, primary scholar, and host of the Peabody Award-winning 26-show documentary series, “Wade in the Water.” It premiered in 1984.
Dr. Reagon composed the score of the 1998 documentary film series “Africans in America,” broadcast by PBS. This film series also won a Peabody Award. Dr. Reagon was music consultant, performer, and composer for video and film projects, including Eyes on the Prize, We Shall Overcome, (which won an Emmy Award,) and the feature film Beloved.
The 2003 Presidential Medal for contributions to the understanding of the Humanities was awarded to Dr. Reagon, as well as The Charles E. Frankel Prize for Contributions to the Public Understanding of the Humanities in 1995. Both awards were given by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
