Bernice Johnson Reagon, founder and leader for three decades of the African American women’s a cappella group, Sweet Honey in the Rock, was not scheduled to sing when she appeared at Yale’s Sprague Hall Sunday night to deliver a talk in connection with the Peabody Museum’s weekend celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr. But it is a performance space, so most in the small crowd who attended (small due to the ice storm) were hopeful they would hear her sing. And sing she did —” her absolutely clear, pure voice resonating through the acoustically perfect hall.
Reagon sang at the beginning and end of her talk, and at various points in between, leading the audience in harmonies to “A Balm in Gilead” and other mainstays of the civil rights movement. In the 1960s she was one of the SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) Singers who rallied and inspired marchers in the South fighting for the right to vote. In 1973 she founded Sweet Honey, from which she recently retired. She’s also a composer, producer, a professor emerita of history, and a curator emerita at the Smithsonian Museum of American History —” “in short, a genius,” as Peabody director Michael Donoghue said in his introduction, calling her “the embodiment of conscience, music and power.”
The theme of the MLK activities at the Peabody is social and environmental justice. “When I think of environmental racism,” Reagon said, “I think of how racism poisons the cultural air. I think of the recent mining tragedy and how the men went into the mine daily, aware of the dangers, knowing about the [safety] violations and that the technologies that could have improved their chances [of surviving a disaster] weren’t put to use. I think of modern agriculture that devastates the living land, and of the fish being drawn from the water with tumors” that scientist say come from their exposure to toxic pollution.
Reagon spoke of lessons she learned from the civil rights movement. “I found out in jail what freedom meant,” she said. She spoke of the beloved community of those fighting for civil and human rights for African Americans, which included both blacks and whites, and said that Martin Luther King, Jr., was part of that community, not a solo actor: “Martin Luther King did not create the movement —” the movement created him.”
She spoke of “the idea that within each of us is a source that taps into the unending energy of the universe. That energy goes right on when you die —” but hopefully it is charged with whatever you did between when you were born and when you died.”
Her talk, and especially her singing, certainly charged up her audience, who gave her a prolonged standing ovation.