Spirit rooted
Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon transitioned this week. She was a fierce, forceful voice for freedom, her music synonymous with the struggles for black liberation. Born in Dougherty County, outside of Albany, Georgia in 1942 she was field secretary of SNCC (Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee) and a founding member of the original SNCC Freedom Singers in 1962. In 1966 she was a founder of the Harambee Singers and in 1973 she founded the internally known African American women’s a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock. Over the course of her life, she was a scholar, organizer, and an activist, acknowledged as a Macarthur Genius and awarded the Presidential Medal for her contributions to public life.
Ruby Sales, one of her comrades in SNCC, wrote upon learning of her passing that she “was a freedom fighter … whose songs and song talk lit the way for my generation as we made the slippery transition from southern apartheid to freedom land. …she kept us connected and grounded to our spiritual roots and the source of our power and resilience until we found our way home again.”
Her powerful voice anchored the music that covered the contours of the civil rights movement, vividly framing the funeral of Medgar Evers and expanding the words of Ella Baker for generations of activists.
I met Dr. Reagon in the early 2000s as she was getting ready to retire. It was at a gathering at Haley Farm as part of the Beloved Communities Initiative. Vincent Harding asked her to open the Sunday morning session, to provide a spiritual grounding for the day.
We gathered in the great room of the farmhouse, Bernice sitting by the fireplace. She explained, with apologizes to Dr. Harding, that she wanted to bring to us some songs we had likely never heard, songs she had been uncovering during her work at the Smithsonian, songs she wanted to sing as they had always been sung, capturing the dark times of enslavement and the persistent hope for freedom. Then she started to sing. She made a long, low tone that started softly, grew deeper and louder, pouring out of the room and over the Tennessee hills. It made my bones shake. Somewhere, as the music surrounded us, I had the sensation that the earth cracked open, deep down at its core, unable to absorb the vibrations she created. Her voice made space for energies long buried to be released. It has been more than 20 years since that morning, yet I can still feel the earth shift she unleashed.
I thought of this moment and the power of spirit rooted activism that she brought to us, as nearly 40 religious leaders gathered at the Campus of Wayne State University in Detroit. They came in response to the disruption of a Jewish-Muslim service earlier.
“Students sanctified the land with their encampment, which was a courageous and beautiful embodiment of our beloved community and an inspiring witness for the peace, justice, and the sacred worth of each and every human being,” Rev. Paul Perez of Central Methodist Church said. “The university’s use of violence desecrated that witness and that space”
“Here, as elsewhere, we have seen with our own eyes, these encampments as beloved communities organized as schools of nonviolence and conscience,” Rev. Bill Wylie-Kellermann said. “We fully support them and their call for university financial transparency and divestment from weapons and war-making. … The financial foundation of this university must not be constructed on the obliteration and bombing of another city’s very foundation.”
In response, the university turned on the sprinkler system to limit the ability of the group to gather at the spot of the encampment. The demonstrators went forward anyway, following the call to “Wade in the Water.”
Across the country such actions are calling on that long legacy of struggle, the breath of ancestors who remind us that “We who believe in freedom cannot rest…until it comes.”