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We called ourselves, in those days — and I’m talking now about 1962, 1963 — sort of like a singing newspaper. We saw our responsibility as being very… - Bernice Johnson Reagon
" "We called ourselves, in those days — and I’m talking now about 1962, 1963 — sort of like a singing newspaper. We saw our responsibility as being very connected to making sure as many people as we could reach understood the complexity of organizing against racism in this country and that you were not always in a position of having a large march with lots of cameras present. Sometimes it was very tedious, mundane work, but no less dangerous. And so, we saw ourselves as really trying to keep an open window on the organizing activities going on in some of the most dangerous areas of the South.
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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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Bernice J. Reagon
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Bernice Johnson
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Additional quotes by Bernice Johnson Reagon
There is a need to understand that we are a culture created by a slave culture and that we still operate out of lessons learned and taught during a time when that system was intact. And so, many of the things that we learn, we learn there, the kind of women we learn how to be, the kind of men we learn how to be. If you can think of the batterers, the leading men of society beating people all the time and integrating it into their lives and into their personality across a 300-year period, you can’t tell me that’s not related to the violence we have to deal with. If you can — if I can tell you about the child abuse that a young child experiences who’s Black on a slave plantation, the battering that Black people experience, where you are whipped for anything, the sexual violence and sexual harassment, we’re talking about 300 years, formative culture in this country.
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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You actually don’t have to lie about what kind of country it is, that there’s a maturity that’s implied in being able to enter discussions and studies about your history, that we need to see more of, especially in terms of our leaders, who seem very afraid to enter a period where we actually talk about these things.
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