Bernice Johnson Reagon, a renowned civil rights activist, singer, composer, and scholar, passed away on Tuesday, July 16, at the age of 81.
Her daughter, acclaimed musician Toshi Reagon, posted a graphic on her Instagram account announcing the transition of her mother on July 16. The cause of death has not been disclosed.
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Born in southwest Georgia, Bernice Johnson Reagon also founded the group Sweet Honey in the Rock in 1973. She retired from the group in 2004. Sweet Honey in the Rock, a three-time Grammy Award-nominated ensemble, used song, dance, and sign language to convey their experiences and history as Black women.
Bernice was a founding member of The Freedom Singers, established by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in the early 1960s. The news of her passing was confirmed by Courtland Cox, chairman of the organization’s Legacy Project, on Wednesday, July 17.
She was a leading scholar of Black musical life. In 1974, she received a music history appointment at the Smithsonian; a year later, she added the title of Dr. after receiving a Ph.D. from Howard University; in 1989, she won a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation. In 1994, she created a 26-part NPR documentary called Wade in the Water that won a Peabody award. And in 1995, she was awarded the Presidential Medal and the Charles Frankel Prize.
Bernice, the daughter of a Baptist minister, studied music at Albany State University. She became a significant figure in the civil rights movement, especially noted during the time Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested in 1962. Reflecting on her activism and the role of music, she said in a 1988 interview on Fresh Air, “I was already in jail, so I missed most of that. But what they began to write about… no matter what the article said, they talked about singing.”
