Bernice Johnson Reagon, singer and civil rights activist, dies at 81

Her daughter, the singer and musician Toshi Reagon, confirmed the death but did not give a specific cause.

Dr. Reagon spent decades working at the intersection of music and activism, promoting Black history and culture as a scholar, performer, composer and producer. She received a PhD in history from Howard University, taught as a professor at American University, worked as a curator at the Smithsonian Institution and explored the development of African American sacred music through books and radio programs, including a Peabody-winning NPR show, “Wade in the Water,” that she created and hosted in 1994.

“My history was wrapped carefully for me by my fore-parents in the songs of the church, the work fields, and the blues,” she wrote in the liner notes to her 1965 solo album “Folk Songs: The South,” describing a moment of self-revelation. “Ever since this discovery I’ve been trying to find myself, using the first music I’ve ever known as a basic foundation for my search for truth.”

The daughter of a Baptist minister, Dr. Reagon came of age while protesting racial segregation in her hometown of Albany, Ga., a white-supremacist stronghold that captured the attention of organizers including the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. She was only 19, a student at Albany State College, when the Albany movement began in November 1961, but she soon gained a reputation as a gifted organizer and performer, going to jail for her activism and singing spirituals and protest songs that fortified her colleagues in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC.

Asked to lead the group in song at one of the movement’s first mass meetings, she started in on a well-known spiritual — “Over my head, I see trouble in the air” — before deciding that the lyrics weren’t right for the occasion. On an impulse, she swapped “trouble” for “freedom.”

“By the second line,” she recalled, “everyone was singing.”

Even seasoned activists found themselves rejuvenated by the music.

“I remember seeing you lift your beautiful black head, stand squarely on your feet, your lips trembling as the melodious words ‘Over my head, I see freedom in the air’ came forth with an urgency and a pain that brought out a sense of intense renewal and commitment of liberation,” SNCC organizer James Forman wrote in a 1972 memoir, “The Making of Black Revolutionaries.”

“Your pain and sorrow were the anguish of the people,” he added, “and you comforted all of us.”

While the Albany movement failed to desegregate the city’s public spaces, it served as a proving ground for civil rights tactics and strategies, and further illustrated the power of protest songs. In late 1962, Dr. Reagon — then known as Bernice Johnson — joined three other musician-activists in forming the Freedom Singers, a choral group that hit the road in a Buick station wagon, performing in support of SNCC and the movement at churches, concert halls, college campuses and coffee houses.

The original lineup included Rutha Mae Harris, Charles Neblett and Cordell Reagon, a tenor who had joined the civil rights struggle in Nashville and married Dr. Reagon in 1963. The group played at the Newport Folk Festival and the March on Washington that year, and also joined performers Harry Belafonte and Thelonious Monk in a benefit concert at Carnegie Hall. Toshi Seeger, the wife of folk singer Pete Seeger, helped the ensemble book shows; she also became the godmother and namesake of Dr. Reagon’s daughter.

“People were always asking, ‘We need help: Can the Freedom Singers come to Nashville?’ ‘Can they come to Atlanta?’ ‘Can they come to a SNCC meeting in McComb, Mississippi?’ ” said author and civil rights historian Taylor Branch, who described Dr. Reagon as “the organizing force” of the group.

“Music was vital,” he added in a phone interview. “It’s the language of pure emotion, and people can sing themselves into doing things they’d be afraid to do otherwise.”

Dr. Reagon, a contralto, likened the Freedom Singers to “a singing newspaper,” spreading the word about the civil rights movement through narratives that she and the other vocalists sprinkled around songs like “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ’Round” (“Ain’t gonna let segregation, Lordy, turn me ’round”) and “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize” (“Paul and Silas bound in jail, had no money for to go their bail”).

Although the original lineup came apart after a couple years, Dr. Reagon continued to sing, forming an Atlanta a cappella group called the Harambee Singers before launching Sweet Honey in the Rock, an all-female, all-Black ensemble that mixed popular genres with traditional music, receiving three Grammy nominations and touring around the world.

Formed in 1973, when Dr. Reagon was working as the vocal director for the D.C. Black Repertory Company, the group took its name from a song title that also doubled as a metaphor, suggesting the strength and sweetness of Black women in general and the group’s members in particular. Their music addressed Black history and political oppression, in a genre-blending format that was “less eclectic than electric, a blend of pain and joy and affirmation,” wrote Washington Post journalist Richard Harrington.

For Dr. Reagon, who retired as the group’s director in 2004, the ensemble’s music reflected a realization she had during her teenage performances at mass meetings. Singing in churches, living rooms and other informal settings, she discovered “culture to be not luxury, not leisure, not entertainment,” she said, “but the lifeblood of a community.”

The third of eight children, Bernice Johnson was born near Albany on Oct. 4, 1942. Her father was a circuit preacher and self-taught carpenter who built the family’s rural home. Her mother looked after the family and “kept us moving to a higher level,” Dr. Reagon told The Post in 1987. “She could always see that we could operate in a different world with more opportunities. She mortgaged her life to make sure we had a chance to do that.”

While studying music at Albany State College, now a university, Dr. Reagon became a leader of the local junior chapter of the NAACP. Her subsequent activism, culminating in her arrest in 1961, led the college to suspend her.

“It also brought about my first real decision for myself,” she recalled, “and I found that I had the capacity to think for myself. I began to wonder who I was, what I was doing here, what really was behind the fear and atrocities suffered by the Negro.” She found answers after enrolling at Spelman College in Atlanta and turning to the spirituals that she had learned as a child in the Baptist Church.

Dr. Reagon dropped out of Spelman to tour with the Freedom Singers, later returning to finish her bachelor’s degree, in history, in 1970. She moved to Washington the next year and received her PhD from Howard in 1975.

By then she was working at the Smithsonian, where she developed a program on the African diaspora for the Folklife Festival, joined the National Museum of American History as a curator and eventually served on the scholarly advisory committee of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. She received a MacArthur “genius” grant in 1989 and was honored by President Bill Clinton with the Charles Frankel Prize for the humanities in 1995.

Her marriage to Cordell Reagon ended in divorce in 1967. In addition to her daughter, who collaborated with her on musical projects that included an opera adaptation of “Parable of the Sower,” the postapocalyptic novel by Octavia E. Butler, survivors include Dr. Reagon’s partner of about three decades, Adisa Douglas; a son, Kwan Reagon; two brothers; two sisters; and a granddaughter.

Performing solo or with Sweet Honey, Dr. Reagon often called on audiences to join her in singing, as when she performed the gospel song “Lord, Remember Me” at the opening of her Barnard College commencement address in 2001.

In her speech, she urged graduates to fight sexism — “I come burdened,” she announced, “because we still live in a culture where one of the first things a female human being learns is to be afraid because they are female” — and to do something worth remembering, in a nod to the song with which she began.

“If you live your life in such a way that your actions transform the space you operate in,” she said, “that’s a way of asking to be remembered.”