The vocalist and singer who founded the outspoken groups Special Honey in the Rock and the Freedom Singers has passed away. She was 81.
Reagon’s girl, the singer Toshi Reagon, announced the death in a common Instagram post.
The Georgia-born Reagon was born into a history of faith-driven engagement. At the age of 16, she studied song at the Georgia HBCU Albany State, the area where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. may be arrested in 1962, prompting regional protest. Some observers noted that the South’s Black churches ‘ music customs were woven into the civil rights movement.
” When you’re in the civil rights movement, that’s the first moment you establish yourself in a relationship that’s very close to the same connection that used to get the Christians thrown in the monkey’s den”, Reagon , told Terry Gross in an exam. And thus, for the first time, those old tunes you can comprehend without anyone else’s help.
Reagon co-founded the Freedom Singers, an a capella group affiliated with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which practiced direct-action demonstrations like the Freedom Rides and sit-ins at isolated restaurants. The Freedom Singers would sing songs that had depict the group’s goals and problems, such as the heartfelt” They Laid Medgar Simmons in His Grave” music.
In 1963, Bernice Johnson wed Cordell Reagon, the co-founder of Freedom Singers. They had two babies, Kwan and Toshi, before divorcing in 1967. She founded a women’s a singing group called Sweet Honey in the Rock in the early 1970s, which went on to win three Grammy nominations and produce a diverse collection of songs that were both religious and issue-driven. The team’s account was designed to evolve over time, and Reagon retired in 2004.
Reagon was also an administrative words for the study of Black music traditions, serving for many years as a teacher in past at American University in Washington, D. C. Through the Smithsonian, she curated a 1970 event” Black Songs Through the Languages of the New World”, and in 1972, joined other scholars to establish the African Diaspora program. She also founded and led the National Museum of American History’s System in Black American Culture.
In 1994, she oversaw the Peabody Award-winning,  , 26-part NPR documentary ,” Wade in the Water: Egyptian American Sacred Music Traditions”.
A Ph.D. was just one of her numerous honors in song and scholarship. D. from Howard University, a “genius give” from the MacArthur Foundation and the Charles E. Frankel Prize, Presidential Medal, from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Reagon is survived by her living companion, Adisa Douglas, children Toshi Reagon and Kwan Reagon, a child, Tashawn Nicole Reagon and many community members.
___
© 2024 Los Angeles Times
Distributed by , Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
