Bernice Johnson Reagon, Founder of Sweet Honey in the Rock, Dead at 81

Bernice Johnson Reagon, civil rights song leader and co-founder of The Freedom Singers who later started the acapella ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock, has died at the age of 81.

Reagon’s death was confirmed by Courtland Cox, the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s Legacy Project, according to NPR. No cause of death was given.

In the Sixties, Johnson Reagon was a central part of the African American struggle for civil rights, starting her work in her hometown of Albany, Georgia, while enrolled in college, where protests and marches were often accompanied by mass arrests. She found inspiration in the songs elders would sing at meetings and community gatherings. “As a singer and activist in the Albany Movement, I sang and heard the freedom songs and saw them pull together sections of the Black community at times when other means of communication were ineffective,” she said on NPR’s Fresh Air. “It was the first time that I knew the power of song to be an instrument for the articulation of our community concerns.”

Reagon was jailed in 1961 for participating in a civil rights demonstration and was kicked out of college for her activism. She went on to co-found the Freedom Singer in 1962, an acappella group that was part of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, alongside Rutha Harris, Charles Neblett, and Cordell Reagon. The group began touring in December of that year to raise money for SNCC and officially became the first group of freedom singers to tour nationally. The group chronicled SNCC activities through songs, including “They Laid Medgar Evers In His Grave,” about a leader’s funeral. She later married Cordell Reagon, with whom she had two children before divorcing in 1967.

In 1966, Johnson Reagon founded the Harambee Singers, which were associated with the Black Consciousness Movement. While serving as the Vocal Director of the Black Repertory Theater at Howard University (where she got her Ph.D. after returning to school following her divorce), she formed Sweet Honey in the Rock, an all-women, African American acappella group that sought to affect change and portray the Black experience through their voices. 

Johnson Reagon served as director of Sweet Honey in the Rock from 1973 until 2003. Following a performance at a 1975 University of Chicago Festival, Flying Fish Records signed the group, and they went on to find great success. Their debut album was self-titled Sweet Honey in the Rock. Other works include In This Land, Sacred Ground, and The Women Gather. The group was nominated for Grammy Awards three times. 

In 1993, Johnson Reagon wrote the book We Who Believe in Freedom: Sweet Honey in The Rock, Still on the Journey, which detailed the history of the group.

Along with her musical pursuits, Johnson Reagon joined the Smithsonian in 1974, where she worked in the Division of Performing Arts/African Diaspora Project as a Cultural Historian. There, she developed two major projects: Wade in the Water: African American Sacred Music Traditions, a radio series, and Voices of the Civil Rights Movement: Black American Freedom Songs, 1960-66. Johnson Reagon won the Peabody Award for Wade in the Water.