For Professor Estelle Freedman, visiting lecturer Bernice Johnson Reagon represented “the alchemy of history and song, the interpretive power of voice.”
For Professor Clayborne Carson, the campus guest was a veteran of the modern African-American freedom struggle. A founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s Freedom Singers in 1962, Reagon was “a major cultural voice,” he said—one who shaped popular understanding of the civil rights movement.
For Nick Cheng, a senior majoring in comparative studies in race and ethnicity, meeting Reagon in person was, well, really sweet. “I’ve been familiar with Sweet Honey in the Rock’s music since childhood, as my parents are fans.” Reagon started the Grammy Award-winning African-American female a cappella ensemble in 1973.
The accolades flowed throughout Reagon’s four-day campus residence in early March. A professor emerita at American University and curator emerita at the Smithsonian Institution, she gave public lectures, held a master class for members of Talisman and presided at a seminar on “coalition politics.” She also was the subject of a feminist studies minicourse, Bernice Johnson Reagon and the Cultural Politics of Racial and Gender Justice, taught by Freedman, Carson and Heather Hadlock, associate professor of music. The class explored the history of democratization movements, the struggle for civil rights, women’s music and feminist politics, among other topics.
“In my lecture course, Introduction to Feminist Studies, I always play in class several songs written by Reagon and performed by Sweet Honey in the Rock, to illustrate themes such as the intersections of race and gender in African-American women’s domestic labor and on the ‘global assembly line,’” Freedman notes.
Reagon was perhaps most at home when she stepped from behind a podium in Dinkelspiel Auditorium and lifted her voice in song. “I come to the stage as a fighter,” she reminded her audience of well-wishers.
Reagon talked about the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and the 1957 integration of Little Rock’s Central High School as if she literally were there today. Speaking slowly, with expansive hand gestures, she sang of “leaning on the everlasting arms” of the Almighty while homes were being bombed. She told about the first time she changed the text of a sacred song, when she sang “Over my head I see freedom in the air”—freedom, not “trouble.” Then came “We shall overcome.”
The circumference of Reagon’s work, which has been recognized with a Presidential Medal and a MacArthur Fellowship, was suggested by the range of sponsoring hosts: the Humanities Center, the Institute for Diversity in the Arts, the Research Institute of Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, Stanford Lively Arts, the Aurora Forum, Talisman and the feminist studies program.
Although she retired from Sweet Honey in the Rock in 2004, Reagon’s compositions continue to reach new generations. Students enrolled in the feminist studies course downloaded her songs from Stanford on iTunes U, including “Joan Little,” “Oughta Be a Woman” and “Ella’s Song.” In the last, composed in 1981, Reagon sings, “The older I get, the better I know that the secret of my going on/Is when the reins are in the hands of the young, who dare to run against the storm.” She also declares that “teaching others to stand up and fight is the only way my struggle survives.”
Senior Megan Andrews, a major in political science, said the seminar got her “really excited about activism and feminism.” She was eager to talk with Reagon about similarities she saw “between the African-American struggle for civil rights and the struggle for LGBT individuals.” Sophomore Deb Meisel was attracted to the notion of the “inevitability of change—how, if [something is] alive, it has to change.”
Her presentation on the song culture of the civil rights movement got the joint jumping. “This is what it’s like to be inside thundering singing,” she said as the Dink audience ratcheted up the impromptu chorus. “People are going for broke,” she cajoled. “You are warriors against racism.”
When the music finally died down, Reagon leaned against the podium and gave the audience a big, encouraging smile: “You did good.”
