His daughter, singer and musician Toshi Reagon, confirmed the death but did not give a specific cause.
Dr. Reagon has spent decades working at the intersection of music and activism, advancing Black history and culture as a scholar, performer, composer, and producer. She earned a PhD in history from Howard University, taught 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 Award-winning NPR show, “Wade in the Water,” which she created and hosted in 1994.
“My ancestors have carefully told my story in the songs of church, country, and blues,” she wrote in the liner notes to her 1965 solo album “Folk Songs: The South,” describing a moment of personal revelation. “Since that discovery, I have been trying to find myself, using the first music I ever knew as the basis for my search for truth.”
The daughter of a Baptist minister, Dr. Reagon grew up protesting racial segregation in her hometown of Albany, Georgia, a bastion of white supremacy that caught the attention of organizers such as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. She was just 19, a student at Albany State College, when the Albany movement began in November 1961, but she quickly gained a reputation as a gifted organizer and performer, going to jail for her activism and singing spirituals and protest songs that strengthened her colleagues in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC.
Invited to lead the group at one of the movement’s first mass gatherings, she began singing a well-known spiritual – “Over my head, I see trouble in the air” – before deciding the words were inappropriate for the occasion. On a whim, she replaced “trouble” with “freedom.”
“From the second line,” she recalls, “everyone was singing.”
Even the most seasoned activists found themselves invigorated by the music.
“I remember watching you raise your beautiful black head, stand with your lips trembling as the melodious words, ‘Above my head I see freedom in the air,’ came out with an urgency and pain that brought out a sense of intense renewal and commitment to liberation,” SNCC organizer James Forman wrote in his 1972 memoir, “The Making of Black Revolutionaries.”
“Your pain and sorrow were the anguish of the people,” he added, “and you comforted us all.”
While the Albany movement failed to desegregate the city’s public spaces, it served as a testing 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 to form 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 coffeehouses.
The original lineup included Rutha Mae Harris, Charles Neblett, and Cordell Reagon, a tenor who had joined the civil rights movement 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 artists Harry Belafonte and Thelonious Monk in a benefit concert at Carnegie Hall. Toshi Seeger, the wife of folk singer Pete Seeger, helped the group organize concerts; 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 group’s “organizing force.”
“Music was vital,” he added in a telephone interview. “It’s the language of pure emotion, and people can sing to do things they would otherwise be afraid to do.”
Dr. Reagon, a contralto, compared the Freedom Singers to “a singing newspaper,” spreading the message of the civil rights movement through stories that she and the other singers interspersed around songs like “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ‘Round” and “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize” (“Paul and Silas in jail, had no money to post bail”).
Although the original lineup disbanded after a few 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 blended popular genres with traditional music, receiving three Grammy nominations and touring worldwide.
Formed in 1973, while Dr. Reagon was working as vocal director for the D.C. Black Repertory Company, the group took its name from a song title that doubled as a metaphor, suggesting the strength and gentleness of black women in general and the band members in particular. Their music addressed black history and political oppression in a genre-bending format that was “less eclectic than electric, a blend of pain, 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 reflects a realization she had while performing at mass gatherings as a teenager. Singing in churches, living rooms and other informal venues, she discovered that “culture is not a luxury, not a hobby, not an 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 an itinerant preacher and a self-taught carpenter who built the family home in the country. Her mother cared for the family and “kept us up to a higher level,” Dr. Reagon told The Post in 1987. “She always saw that we could move into a different world with more opportunity. 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 later activism, which culminated in her arrest in 1961, led to the university suspending her.
“It also led me to my first real personal decision,” she recalls, “and I discovered that I had the ability to think for myself. I began to question who I was, what I was doing here, what was really behind the fear and atrocities that black people suffered.” She found answers after enrolling at Spelman College in Atlanta and turning to the spiritual songs she had learned as a child in the Baptist church.
Dr. Reagon left Spelman to tour with the Freedom Singers, then returned to complete her bachelor’s degree in history in 1970. She moved to Washington the following year and received her doctorate from Howard in 1975.
She then worked 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 scientific advisory board of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. She received a MacArthur Genius Fellowship in 1989 and was honored by President Bill Clinton with the Charles Frankel Prize in 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 including an opera adaptation of Octavia E. Butler’s post-apocalyptic novel “Parable of the Sower,” survivors include Dr. Reagon’s partner of nearly three decades, Adisa Douglas; a son, Kwan Reagon; two brothers; two sisters; and a granddaughter.
Whether solo or with Sweet Honey, Dr. Reagon often invited the audience to join her in singing, as when she performed the gospel song “Lord, Remember Me” as her commencement address at Barnard College in 2001.
In her speech, she urged the graduates to fight against sexism — “I am overwhelmed,” she announced, “because we still live in a culture where one of the first things a woman learns is to be afraid because she is a woman” — and to do something worth remembering, in a nod to the song she opened with.
“If you live your life in such a way that your actions transform the space in which you operate,” she said, “that is a way of asking to be remembered.”