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"As
a scholar, singer, composer, organizer and activist, Dr. Reagon
spent over half a century speaking out against racism and
systemic inequities in the U.S. and globally," daughter Toshi
Reagon, who like her mother is a musician and activist, said in
announcing her death on Facebook.
No cause of death was given.
Born in 1942 in Dougherty County, Georgia, she became active in
the civil rights movement at Georgia's Albany State College, an
historically Black institution that now is a university,
according to a biography on her website.
Reagon was a member of the original Student Non-Violent
Coordinating Committee Freedom Singers, formed in 1962. The
Freedom Singers performed to raise money for SNCC projects and
to rally activists.
In an online SNCC archive, Reagon is quoted describing her early
work. At one of the first large meetings she helped organize in
Albany, she was asked to lead a song and started an African
American spiritual: “Over my head, I see Trouble in the Air.”
She replaced "trouble" with "freedom," and said that "by the
second line everyone was singing.”
In 1973 she formed Sweet Honey in the Rock, an a cappella group
of African American women. Among the best-known of the Johnson
compositions the group performed was "Ella's Song," with its
driving refrain -- "we who believe in freedom cannot rest, we
who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes" -- and other
lines inspired by the speeches of another pioneering civil
rights figure, Ella Baker. "Ella's Song" can still be heard at
demonstrations today.
She also was a music scholar who studied the African American
spiritual. She was professor emeritus of history at American
University and curator emeritus at the Smithsonian's National
Museum of American History.
(Reporting by Daniel Trotta; editing by Donna Bryson and Michael
Perry)
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