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I’m a historian and a radical, and I don’t see resurging something from the past to address contemporary issues. I think we really have to do somethi… - Bernice Johnson Reagon
" "I’m a historian and a radical, and I don’t see resurging something from the past to address contemporary issues. I think we really have to do something that is of the time we’re in to address what we’re facing. There is a major effort to resolve issues in this society by locking people up in jail. And it is absolutely expanding. So people are going into business, and states almost are going into business. It’s almost like — it reminds me, when I hear about a state like Texas renting itself out, I think about Kentucky and Virginia and Maryland breeding slaves. I mean, there’s a market now for locking people up. And there are states going into it. And there are corporations where people can buy stock into prison industries and prison-based industries. That means you have to build them. There’s a technology to it. And this is major. And I think the civil rights movement addressed an issue during its time. But I think we’re going to all be very challenged to get very serious about trying to find ways to respond in complex ways to what we’re seeing in our society.
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About Bernice Johnson Reagon
Bernice Johnson Reagon (born Bernice Johnson; October 4, 1942 – July 16, 2024) was a song leader, composer, scholar, and social activist, who in the early 1960s was a founding member of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee's (SNCC) Freedom Singers in the Albany Movement in Georgia. She earned her Ph.D. from Howard University becoming a cultural historian, centered on the role of music, and was an emeritus faculty member in the History Department at The American University. She wa been a scholar-in-residence at Stanford and received an honorary doctorate of music from Berklee College of Music.
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Alternative Names:
Bernice J. Reagon
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Bernice Johnson
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Additional quotes by Bernice Johnson Reagon
It is very difficult to be born female in this country and not be — not be fearful. One of the first lessons you get is that it’s a culture that preys on girls and teenagers and women. And so you go through your life with this little trail of fear as a girl and as a woman in this culture. And so, the Joan Little case was important to me because I thought, “Aha, they die!” — rapists, you know. I thought it was an interesting idea to add to this culture of fear I was living with. I owe Joan Little a lot.
The African American culture is just a rich singing culture. When you take a culture like that and move it into a kind of crisis, a trauma state, which is what you would have to say happened with the civil rights movement activity, then you actually get an expansion and an empowerment and explosion of the singing, because the singing matches the increased energy coming out of the community.
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