Bernice Johnson Reagan, singing civil rights activist, Smithsonian music archivist, and Black feminist writer. died at age 81 on Tuesday this week. I appreciate this thorough write-up of her life on womenhistory.org, which told me many things about her that I didn't know.
I discovered her (and Sweet Honey in the Rock) in 1982 when a college friend made me go to a campus concert at a time when I was working 80 hours a week. It's hard to sort out everything in my life, of course, but I think their songs were one of the biggest influences on my politics from then on.
At the end of the womenshistory.org article, there's a 2010 video of Johnson Reagon performing for a Washington, D.C. audience that includes the Obama family. Here in the summer of 2024, it's startling and a bit painful to suddenly be reimmersed in that more rational time (remember when Michelle Obama invited Sweet Honey in the Rock to the White House?).
Johnson Reagon sings the song "Ain't gonna let nobody turn me around," accompanied by her daughter Toshi on guitar, with two other vocalists. They start out for the first few bars, and then she stops the song, saying, "Wait wait wait":
I know this is a show, but, uh...
You have to actually sing the song.
You can never tell when you might need it!
The audience laughs, and the song is started over with the audience singing along.
You can never tell when you might need to know the songs of struggle. We need them now. And as the song says, you should never let anybody turn you around on the way to freedom and justice.
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