Bernice Johnson Reagon, Sweet Honey in the Rock founder, dead at 81
American civil rights singer, composer, scholar, and social activist Bernice Johnson Reagon has passed away at the age of 81, leaving behind a legacy that extends well beyond the music industry.
In the early 1960s, Reagon served as a founding member of the Freedom Singers, established by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in Georgia. The organisation’s Legacy Project chairman Courtland Cox confirmed the news of her death, but at this stage, no cause has been provided.
Reagon was heavily involved in the civil rights movement, a lifelong association that began during her college days and lasted for the rest of her life. Inspired by the strong sense of community she grew up around and the music she loved, that combination and activism would become one of her defining traits.
However, it wasn’t without incident. Reagon was imprisoned in 1961 and subsequently removed from college due to her activism, which led to the forming of the Freedom Singers the following year. In 1966, she formed the Harambee Singers, who were linked to the Black Consciousness Movement.
After returning to her studies following her divorce from fellow Freedom Singers member Cordell Reagon – with whom she had two children – Reagon acquired a PhD at Howard University, where she also served as the vocal director of the Black Repertory Theatre.
It was here where she formed Sweet Honey in the Rock in 1973, an all-women a cappella group of African-American singers who used their voices and songs to reflect the modern Black experience and touch on societal, racial, congressional, environmental, and gender issues.
More than 20 vocalists have been part of the group since its inception, with Reagon acting as its director until 2003. In between those two points, Sweet Honey in the Rock landed a record deal in 1975 and found huge success over a number of decades, earning three Grammy nominations along the way.
Reagan also specialised in African-American history, joining the Smithsonian in 1974 and working in the division of Performing Arts and African Diaspora Project as a cultural historian. One o her major projects was 26-part radio series Wade in the Water: African American Sacred Music Traditions, which won her a Peabody Award following its release in 1994.
Reagon’s career was shaped in her earliest years, after she once shared that the songs she heard and the people she saw singing them helped “pull together sections of the Black community at times when other means of communication were ineffective.” From then on, she recognised “the power of song to be an instrument for the articulation of our community concerns,” which ultimately inspired her life’s work.
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