THE BLACK FREEDOM MOVEMENT, US Left and the DC music scene lost one of their most important musical figures this summer. On July 16, 2024, Bernice Johnson Reagon passed away in DC at the age of 81. Reagon’s career as an activist-musician over the past six decades is well-known. Born in 1942 and raised in southwestern Georgia, Reagon entered Albany State College in Albany, Georgia, in 1959 and was quickly swept up by student involvement in the Civil Rights Movement during the early 1960s. Reagon became an organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and, as a talented and dedicated vocalist, a member of SNCC’s official musical ensemble, The Freedom Singers. The group performed around the US, including at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and that year’s Newport Folk Festival. For a brief period, The Freedom Singers’ concerts were a key funding mechanism for SNCC. Eventually expelled because of her organizing, Reagon would later finish her undergraduate degree at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, before relocating permanently to DC. Here, she founded the all-female, social justice–oriented acapella group Sweet Honey in the Rock in 1973. Led by Reagon for decades, Sweet Honey became a world-renowned musical sensation.
Although best-known for her activist-musician activities, Reagon was also a cultural historian of rare analytical power and depth. While leading Sweet Honey, Reagon taught cultural history at American University, produced pioneering music history research for the Smithsonian and published monographs on Black American music. Those who know Reagon primarily through her performing activities may be unaware of the depth of her scholarly insights and the extent of her scholarship’s reach in cultural and historical studies of music.
Reagon received her Ph.D. in history from Howard University in 1975. Over the past half-century, Reagon’s still-unpublished dissertation, “Songs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1955-1965: A Study in Culture History,” has developed an unspoken but far-reaching influence in historical, ethnomusicological and sociological scholarship on music, political movements and the Black Freedom Struggle. Ethnomusicologist Thomas Turino draws heavily on Reagon in his 2008 book, Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation, one of the most influential introductory ethnomusicological texts of the past two decades. Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing Traditions in the Twentieth Century, a landmark collection of sociological essays on music and politics, is largely premised on ideas from Reagon’s dissertation. “Songs of the Civil Rights Movement” is a quiet but foundational work for US scholarship on these topics.
Despite this influence, the most profound theoretical and historical insights of Reagon’s groundbreaking dissertation are overlooked by scholars who cite her work. In fact, scholars consistently only refer to her most mundane observations. Both examples above draw on Reagon to make the obvious point that participatory musical activity is a positive tactic in constructing mass political subjectivity. However, Reagon herself saw the fact of participatory singing in the Civil Rights Movement as an obvious preface to a more profound analysis—how the musical activities of the Movement developed beyond singing as a spontaneous tactic of rallies, marches and other actions as well as what that development revealed about the history of the Civil Rights Movement itself.
Throughout “Songs of the Civil Rights Movement,” Reagon repeatedly identifies how the complexity of political organizations can be determined by the tactical function of their musical activity. She claims that the intricate level of organization reached by the Civil Rights Movement in the early 1960s can be seen in how musical activity began to function in multiple ways. Specifically, it became both an internal tool of Movement cohesion and an external tool of Movement expansion. According to Reagon, the emergence of an affiliated, professional vocal group (The Freedom Singers) from SNCC’s robust internal culture of participatory singing at rallies, marches and actions represented a transition to a more complex organization. The profundity of this point cannot be overstated. Reagon was effectively suggesting that histories of political organizations can be split into distinct periods based on changes in the form and function of their musical and cultural activity.
Reagon demonstrates just how important SNCC’s development of an outward-facing tactical role for music is to understanding the organization’s history. She points out the way The Freedom Singers, as well as other Movement musical groups, reactivated the latent political connotations of the 1960s folk revival. The folk revival, which had its origins in the popular front cultural strategy of the American Communist Party (CPUSA), had been stripped of much of its political content by the Second Red Scare. When the folk revival experienced a commercial comeback in the early 1960s, its politically committed orientation remained to an extent. The scene had grown into a larger commercial milieu, however, that encompassed a broad swath of musicians and fans outside a shrinking US Left. Reagon correctly points out that Civil Rights Movement–affiliated groups like The Freedom Singers, The Montgomery Gospel Trio and The Nashville Quartet led a massive re-politicization of folk musicians and fans. This revitalized the folk revival’s tradition of politically committed topical song and expanded the political base and media reach of the Civil Rights Movement.
While groups like The Freedom Singers are sometimes framed as being a product of the politics of the folk revival, Reagon contests that it was actually the intervention of the increasingly complex musical infrastructure of Civil Rights organizations like SNCC that produced a re-politicized folk-revival scene. Crucially, Reagon claims that it was largely SNCC’s musical merger with the folk revival that facilitated the Civil Rights Movement’s transition from a regional movement based in the South to a national movement with a cross-regional and multiracial base. Just as Reagon contended, a development in the tactical use of music precipitated a major turning point in the history of SNCC and the broader Civil Rights Movement.
Despite the influence of Reagon’s dissertation, these sophisticated claims are underappreciated. This is likely because “Songs of the Civil Rights Movement” remains unpublished after nearly 50 years. Julius S. Scott’s legendary 1986 Ph.D. dissertation, “The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Communication in the Era of the Haitian Revolution,” an account of the Caribbean lower classes before the Haitian Revolution, has a similar history. Despite its rejection by publishers, Scott’s thesis was immensely, though quietly, influential in the fields of American and Caribbean Studies for decades. Like Reagon’s dissertation, the incredible intellectual reach of “The Common Wind” was an unspoken, open secret in US historical disciplines. After 30 years of cult status, “The Common Wind” was finally published by Verso Books in 2018.
When I first engaged with Reagon’s dissertation, I was awed by the sophistication of her ideas about music and history as well as the clarity of her prose. I don’t know why “Songs of the Civil Rights Movement” has never been published, but it’s a shame that Reagon’s research is not nearly as accessible as her music. Like Scott’s “The Common Wind,” it may be time to finally push for the publication of one of the most important scholarly works ever produced on music in the Black Freedom Movement. I can’t think of a better way to memorialize the passing of one of the Movement’s most important musical and intellectual figures.
