Bernice Johnson Reagon, founder of The Freedom Singers and Sweet Honey in the Rock, has died at 81: NPR

Bernice Johnson Reagon, appearing at Odetta’s memorial service at Riverside Church in New York City in 2009.

Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images

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Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images

Bernice Johnson Reagon, appearing at Odetta’s memorial service at Riverside Church in New York City in 2009.

Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images

Bernice Johnson Reagon, a civil rights activist who co-founded The Freedom Singers and later founded the African-American a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock, has died at the age of 81.

Reagon’s death was confirmed Wednesday evening by Courtland Cox, president of the Legacy Project of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

It is impossible to separate the struggle for liberation from the song. And in the 1960s—at marches and in prisons—the voice that led those songs was often Bernice Johnson Reagon. Her work as a scholar and activist continued throughout her life, in universities and concert halls, at rallies and in churches.

The future singer was born in southwest Georgia, the daughter of a Baptist minister. She was admitted to Albany State, a historically black public university, at the age of 16 and studied music. Albany, Georgia, would become a major center of the civil rights movement when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested there in 1962, bringing a media frenzy to the town.

Reagon, however, was not there to witness the scene. “I was in prison, so I missed most of it,” she recalled wryly. WHYY’s Fresh Air 1988. “But what they started writing… no matter what the article said, they were all about singing.”

The songs that captivated the media were freedom songs—often remixed versions of hymns familiar to anyone raised in an African-American church. Reagon later said that in many cases, she simply replaced the word “Jesus” with “freedom,” as in the rousing “Woke Up This Morning.”

After Albany State kicked her out for her arrest, the budding civil rights organizer co-founded The Freedom Singers, an a cappella group that was part of SNCC. Through music, the Freedom Singers chronicled SNCC activities, including the funeral of a movement leader (“They put Medgar Evers in his grave.“) and a visit by a Kenyan official invited by the State Department to demonstrate U.S. steps toward racial integration (“Oginga Odinga“).

The interweaving of song and protest helped shape the era and the people fighting for equality, he said. civil rights professor Kevin Gaines.

“When they were arrested and put in prison vans, when they were in jail, when they were gathering in African-American churches to organize the next protest, civil rights activists sang in all of those settings,” Gaines said.

Reagon recalled, on Clean airBeing a good troublemaker isn’t necessarily encouraged.

“If you grow up in a black family, the best badge you can have is that you never get in trouble with the law,” she said. But she drew parallels between the civil rights struggle and biblical stories like that of Paul and Silas, who were imprisoned for their ministry.

“When you get into the civil rights movement, that’s the first time you have a relationship that’s pretty close to the relationship that got Christians thrown into the lions’ den,” she said. “And so for the first time, those old songs you understand in a way that no one can teach you.”

In 1963, Bernice Johnson married Freedom Singers co-founder Cordell Reagon. They had two children, Kwan Tauna and Toshi, who later became a musical star. After their divorce in 1967, Reagon returned to school, received a Ford Foundation Scholarship, and founded the all-female a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock.

Her activism grew to include the anti-apartheid movement. She became a leading scholar of black musical life. In 1974, she received an appointment as a music historian. at Smithsonian; in 1989 she won a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation. In 1994 she created a 26 NPR documentary called Wade in the Water won a Peabody Award. And in 1995, she was awarded the Presidential Medal and the Charles E. Frankel Award.

wade in water is a listener’s guide to African American religious music—a music that celebrates the ways in which both worship and liberation are sacred.