Reflections on Bernice Johnson Reagon,
by Vincent G. Harding

All over the world, where women and men join in movements for justice, hope and transformation, one great discovery is always powerfully present. Everywhere in the midst of such transformative struggles, we see human spaces unexpectedly opened. The participants in these movements for democratic change discover great new potentials in their lives, opportunities for loving, serving, creating new realities they never before dreamed possible. In these situations new lives are created. New strengths are discovered. New voices sounded.

Bernice Johnson Reagon is a magnificent example of this extraordinary reality. She was born in the early 1940s in Southwest Georgia, daughter of a gifted black Baptist pastor and a devoted churchwoman mother. By the time she was a teenager she became aware that "something was happening with black people and I didn't want it to happen without me." That "something" burning into Reagon's consciousness was, of course, the rise of the post-World War II African-American movement to challenge the southern ways of segregation and white supremacy and to open America's democracy to new life and new truth for all its people. Though it is usually referred to as the "Civil Rights Movement," this was even more fundamentally a movement to transform America, its black and white people and the future of its democracy. Seen from a global perspective the movement was also a vital part of the world-wide rising of peoples of color--in Africa, Asia and Latin America--to assert their God-given human rights to self-determination and to challenge the assumption that white people had the right and responsibility to control the destinies of non-white peoples all over the world.

Contrary to her fears, Reagon did not sleep through this transformative period in America. Instead, she became a crucial part of the Freedom Movement (as it was most often called by its black and white participants) and it transformed both her magnificent singing voice and her sense of who she was and what her life was for. Beginning in her own community of Albany, Georgia in the early 1960s Reagon organized, marched, sat-in, and went to jail as a leading member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the front-line, risk-taking nonviolent soldiers of the southern movement who traveled across the south challenging the anti-democratic white-controlled status quo. Wherever she went, confronting unjust law officers in the line of march, living through harsh prison times, or standing in front of movement mass meetings, Reagon carried the songs, transforming the ones she had first heard in church, just as she was being transformed, finding a new voice within herself that she had never known before. Everywhere she sang, Reagon realized not only that she had a new voice, but she had a new purpose in singing. It was in the course of those powerful movement days in Albany that my wife, Rosemarie, and I first met Bernice. We were deeply impressed by her determined spirit and her marvelous gift of song leading.

Raising that newly-discovered struggle-honed voice with others, Bernice helped to create The Freedom Singers, a quartet of two male and two female SNCC freedom workers who took the songs and stories of the movement across the south and the nation. The Freedom Singers brought information and inspiration and raised thousands of dollars for the constantly cash-strapped SNCC forces. After the birth of her two children, Toshi and Kwan--the fruit of her marriage to Cordell Hull Reagon, one of her fellow movement workers and Freedom Singers--Bernice began to travel less and set her attention to completing her formal education. She returned to Spelman College in Atlanta to finish her undergraduate degree and in the same period founded The Harambee singers, a women's a cappella group.

During her time at Spelman Bernice became one of my first and best history department majors. (So I was not surprised when she developed into one of her generation's foremost cultural historians.) Beyond the campus, as Rosemarie indicates below, our families shared a large old house and many new cultural and political projects. For instance, working with the late literary critic and blues lover, Stephen Henderson of Morehouse College, Bernice gave important leadership in creating a pioneering community cultural event called the Penny Festival. Filled with the music, dance, history and great hope of the African American community, it was open to anyone who could spare a one-cent admission fee. Always displaying an unerring and creative gift for democratic cultural organizing, Bernice knew -- and still knows -- how to encourage others to develop their best gifts, never overwhelming us with her own magnificent power, and never accommodating herself to careless work by others. In the early 1970s Bernice and her children moved to Washington, D.C. where she entered a doctoral program in history at Howard University.

Not long after moving to Washington, Bernice almost accidentally took on what became the next major challenge of her life. Responding to the urging of others and to her own belief that it was necessary to share with younger generations what she had learned about the great treasures of African-American musical traditions, Bernice organized 'Sweet Honey in the Rock'. This award-winning black women's vocal ensemble became one of the major cultural points of connection between the Black Consciousness Movement, the Women's Movement and various movements for Third World solidarity in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. Following Reagon's recent retirement, the group now continues under Bernice's direction to gift the nation and the world with a contemporary, movement-shaped manifestation of the African-American song tradition. In recent years, Bernice has retired from a prolific and creative tenure as curator for the Smithsonian Institute in the area of African American history and culture. She is also professor emeritus at the American University in Washington, D.C.

Along the way from her life as a gifted teenager in Dougherty county, one of Georgia's most dangerous locales for Black people, Bernice has continued to stay wide awake to all the transformation that has happened in the social and political experience of African Americans. She has in fact contributed a remarkable share to the on-going work to transform her home state, her home region and the entire nation into the democratic communities they might yet be. In our interview with her, Bernice Johnson Reagon urges all of us -- and especially young people -- to step outside of the "safety zone," to create healthy new life for ourselves and for our country as we work unremittingly toward "a more perfect union."

Vincent Harding
Co-founder and Chairperson, The Veterans of Hope Project
April 2000