2009 Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration

Keynote Speaker Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon

The Power of Voice

By Jeff Gill

Scholar, teacher, composer, “songtalker,” and producer Bernice Johnson Reagon says she was deeply moved by the 2008 presidential campaign and by the ways people asked “How can our voices be heard?”

It has been students, Dr. Reagon says, who have helped to answer that question. “At every campus I’ve been on recently, the students have been engaged, not just in national politics, but state and local issues, in ways I’ve not felt since the voter registration efforts we undertook in the Civil Rights movement.”

The importance of speaking out — and singing out — on issues that matter has been central to Dr. Reagon’s life. She will present the keynote address for Denison University’s Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration at 1 p.m. on Monday, Jan. 26, in Swasey Chapel, where she will be joined in “songtalk” by the Denison student group Tehillah.

Born in southwestern Georgia in a time when African Americans were still blocked from free and full participation in elections, whether local or national, Dr. Reagon was raised a Baptist preacher’s daughter. She learned the hymns of her tradition in a church that couldn’t afford a piano, so a cappella singing was the heart of worship.

Young Bernice learned that her voice could rally others, and not only at church. She earned scholarships for her singing, but her college career was interrupted when the administration at Albany (Ga.) State College took a dislike to her arrests related to the Civil Rights Movement — so much so that she was expelled for “conduct unbecoming an Albany State student,” Dr. Reagon says with a laugh.

After marrying Cordell Reagon, who also was a member of the original Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (or SNCC) Freedom Singers quartet, she paused again while a student at Spelman College in Atlanta to have their two children.

Ultimately, she finished her degree as a single mother, and the quality of her work led her to Washington, D.C., and Howard University, where she earned a Ph.D. in history.

Woven through these academic pursuits, Dr. Reagon has been involved in the arts, both as a curator with the Smithsonian Institution — preserving the material and musical culture of the African diaspora from slavery and the Civil Rights Movement — and in performance. In addition to her involvement with the Freedom Singers and the Harambee Singers in Atlanta, she also was founder of the Grammy-winning a capella ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock, after coming to Washington to work as vocal director of the D.C. Repertory Company.

Teaching has been central to Dr. Reagon’s career, whether during concert performances, or in conversations with student groups, or through discourse in public media. She spent more than a decade putting together what became the Peabody Award-winning series for National Public Radio “Wade In the Water: African American Sacred Music Traditions,” and later was consultant, composer and performer for the PBS series “Eye on the Prize” and “We Shall Overcome.”

Dr. Reagon has received prestigious public recognition for her work, including a MacArthur “genius grant” Fellowship in 1989. But much of the work to which she has committed her life has taken many years, even decades, to pull together and garner both institutional and practical support. Yet she has maintained an amazing record of publication and productivity, including producing 17 albums with Sweet Honey in the Rock, curating multiple national touring exhibits, and authoring many books and essays over the years.

“My mother did steps,” Dr. Reagon says, with great emphasis on the word “steps.” “She always had a goal in mind. She didn’t always know if the resources or the opportunities would be there, but she focused on taking the next step — which might be a half step! You start to shift your weight and swing that foot out, and where will that swinging foot fall? You don’t always know, but I can’t imagine not moving until everything is locked down. You have to keep moving.”

Dr. Reagon is retired from touring with Sweet Honey in the Rock. She is a professor emeritus at the American University in Washington and curator emeritus at the National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian, but she’s still moving, still focused on the next step. In recent years, she has written an opera libretto with the famed avant-garde composer Robert Wilson, and a ballet score.

Now she’s looking forward to the events that will swirl around her home in Washington, D.C., just days before her keynote address at Denison — especially the inauguration of President Barack Obama on Jan. 20 — but she doesn’t want anyone to forget too quickly the amazing effort and energy that went into the election campaign itself.

“I have a particular appreciation of the work that was done in Ohio,” she says.

Lisa Scott, Denison’s director of institutional equity and diversity, says Dr. Reagon’s participation in this year’s Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration is important for several reasons. “She is a witness to the Civil Rights Movement,” Scott says. “While still a student, she put her life and her values on the line. As a witness, activist, author, and full participant, Dr. Reagon has a powerful story to tell. And as a pre-eminent scholar of freedom music, she can share her great breadth of knowledge regarding the power of music in struggle.”

For more information about Dr. Reagon, link to her Web site at www.bernicejohnsonreagon.com/