Bernice Johnson Reagon, the founder of the women’s a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock, died on Tuesday in Washington. She was 81 and died in a hospital, according to her daughter, Toshi Reagon, who did not give a cause.
Bernice Reagon was an original member of the Freedom Singers, a vocal quartet that provided songs to inspire civil rights protesters preparing to confront the police. The Freedom Singers were associated with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which sent them to events across the South, as well as to the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island in 1963.
She went on to earn a doctorate in American history from Howard University in 1975 and to direct the Black American Culture Program at the Smithsonian. There, she curated a collection of blues, gospel and spiritual music.
She founded Sweet Honey in the Rock in 1973, drawing on African American music traditions from the church and the fields with original songs. The group appeared at everything from rock festivals to Carnegie Hall, weaving political messages into their music.
Reagon was also a composer, consultant and performer on notable television and radio series, including the documentaries Eyes on the Prize (1987), about the civil rights movement, and Ken Burns’s The Civil War (1990), to which she contributed We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder to the soundtrack.
She was a producer and host of Wade in the Water: African American Sacred Music Traditions (1994), a National Public Radio series on Black church music that won a Peabody Award. She also was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1989 and was a distinguished professor of history at American University from 1993 to 2003.
In addition to her daughter, Reagon is survived by a son, Kwan, her life partner, Adisa Douglas, siblings Jordan Warren Johnson, Deloris Johnson Spears, Adetokunbo Tosu Tosasolim and Mamie Johnson Rush, and a granddaughter.
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