Bernice Johnson Reagon, whose powerful voice helped propel the Civil Rights Movement, has died

“From the time I was born, we were always singing,” Reagon said. “When you’re inside a culture and, quote, ‘doing what comes naturally to you,’ you don’t pay attention to it. … I think my work as a cultural scholar, singer and composer would be completely different if I had not had someone draw my attention to the people who use songs to stay alive, or to keep themselves together, or to lift up the energy in a movement.”

While a student at Albany State College, Reagon was jailed for attending a civil rights demonstration and expelled. She later graduated from Spellman College. She formed Sweet Honey in the Rock while a graduate student of history at Howard University and vocal director of the D.C. Black Repertory Company.

Reagon recorded her first solo album, “Folk Songs: The South,” with Folkways Records in 1965. In 1966 she became a founding member of the Atlanta-based Harambee Singers.

Reagon began working with the Smithsonian Institution in 1969, when she was invited to develop and curate a 1970 festival program, Black Music Through the Languages of the New World, according to the Smithsonian. She went on to curate the African Diaspora Program and to found and direct the Program in Black American Culture at the National Museum of American History, where she was later a curator emeritus. She produced and performed on numerous Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.

For a decade, beginning in 1993, Reagon served as distinguished professor in history at American University in Washington, later becoming a professor emerita.

We assume that music was always a part of civil rights activism, Kernodle said, but it was people like Reagon who made music “part of the strategy of nonviolent resistance. …They took those songs, they took those practices from inside the church to the streets and the jail cells. And they universalized those songs.”

“What she also did that was very important was that she historicized how that music functioned in the civil rights movement,” Kernodle added. “Her dissertation was one of the first real studies of civil rights music.”

Reagon received two George F. Peabody Awards, including for her work as principal scholar, conceptual producer and host of the Smithsonian Institution and National Public Radio series “Wade in the Water: African American Sacred Music Traditions.”

She was also the recipient of the Charles E. Frankel Prize, Presidential Medal, for outstanding contributions to public understanding of the humanities, a MacArthur Fellows Program award, and the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change Trumpet of Conscience Award.