|
We honor and celebrate the life and light that Bernice Johnson Reagon had in the world. Reagon was an influential songtalker, composer, scholar, and activist.
Howard Zinn wrote about Reagon in his autobiography You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train in Chapter 4, “‘My Name Is Freedom’: Albany, Georgia”:
The people I encountered in Albany in those days made me think of what stored-up courage and self-sacrifice one finds in so many people who never make the headlines but represent millions.
…
Bernice Johnson, who organized the Albany Freedom Singers and was expelled from Albany State College for her determined involvement in the movement. I helped her get into Spelman College, but both the college and its famous glee club were too narrow to contain her spirit and her voice. She sat in our living room one day to tell us this, and then sang, with that magnificent deep voice. (Later, she would get a Ph.D. in history, but that does not begin to suggest her power. She would become an indefatigable curator of oral history at the Smithsonian, inspire countless audiences, and sing at Carnegie Hall and all over the country with her group Sweet Honey in the Rock.)
| 
