Bernice Johnson Reagon



Reagon is a singer, composer, cultural historian, curator and activist. She is the Distinguished Professor of History at American University specializing in the history of African American culture, and also holds the position of Curator Emerita at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History. She is best known as a performer with Sweet Honey In The Rock, a singing group she formed in 1973 that has 14 CD recordings to its credit. The group's most recent recording is called "twenty-five."

Reagon's solo work has been featured in several award-winning documentaries, including "The Songs Are Free: Bernice Johnson Reagon with Bill Moyers," a 60-minute production of Public Affairs Television. She has won Emmy awards for her composition and/or performance in "Eyes on the Prize;" "We Shall Overcome;" "Roots of Resistance: A Story of the Underground Railroad;" and "Frederick Douglass: The Lion Who Wrote History." Reagon also has a number of solo recordings.

Wearing her curator/historian hat, Reagon produced and hosted a National Public Radio/ Smithsonian Institution collaboration entitled "Wade in the Water: African American Sacred Music Traditions," a series for which she received the 1994 Peabody Award for Significant and Meritorious Achievement in Broadcasting. In addition, Reagon provided the sound score for the Peabody Award-winning 1998 PBS series, "Africans in America" and for the TNT film, "Freedom Song," also composing and performing with Sweet Honey In The Rock on the Sony film score release.

She served as editor and contributing author for two books: "We'll Understand it Better By and By: Pioneering African American Gospel Composers," published in 1992; and "We Who Believe in Freedom: Sweet Honey in the Rock Still on the Journey," published in 1993. A book of her songs was published in 1986.

In 1989 Reagon was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, also called the genius grant, for her work as an artist and scholar of African American culture. Other awards include the Presidential Medal, the Charles E. Frankel Prize for outstanding contribution to public understanding of the humanities, the Isadora Duncan award for her creation of the score to a ballet called "Rock", and most recently, the first recipient of the Leeway Foundation's Leeway Laurel, a grant awarded to outstanding women in the arts.

A charter member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Freedom Singers, Reagon was an active member of the Civil Rights Movement. Because of her involvement in SNCC, she was suspended from Albany State College in Albany, Ga. She eventually received a bachelor's degree in history from Spelman College, and was awarded a Ph.D. from Howard University.





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