Bernice Johnson Reagon

Bernice Johnson Reagon (October 4, 1942 – July 16, 2024) was an American song leader, composer, scholar, and social activist who, in the early 1960s, was a founding member of the Freedom Singers, organized by the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the Albany Movement in Georgia. In 1973, she founded the all-black female ''a cappella'' ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock, based in Washington, D.C. Reagon, along with other members of the SNCC Freedom Singers, realized the power of collective singing to unify the disparate groups who began to work together in the 1964 Freedom Summer protests in the South.

}}The Albany Singing Movement became a vital catalyst for change through music in the early 1960s protests of the Civil Rights era. Reagon devoted her life to social justice through music via recordings, activism, community singing, and scholarship.

She earned her Ph.D. from Howard University, becoming a cultural historian, centered on the role of music, and she was an emeritus faculty member in the History Department at The American University. She had also been a scholar-in-residence at Stanford and received an honorary doctorate of music from Berklee College of Music. Provided by Wikipedia