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Interview with Bernice Johnson Reagon
Conducted by Marvette Pérez
From RHR #68Introduction
Bernice Johnson Reagon is Distinguished Professor of History at American University and
Curator Emeritus at the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History. She
is a specialist in African American oral, performance, and protest traditions. Reagon
continues to perform with Sweet Honey in the Rock, the world renowned a cappella ensemble
she founded. As a solo singer, Reagon describes herself as a "song leader in the
nineteenth century African American choral tradition in search of a congregation."
During the Civil Rights Movement, Reagon was a member of the original SNCC (Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) Freedom Singers. She has served as music consultant,
composer, and performer for several award-winning film and video projects. In 1989 she was
awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for her work as an artist and scholar of African American
culture. She served as principal scholar, conceptual producer, and host of the
pathbreaking Smithsonian Institution and National Public Radio series "WADE IN THE
WATER: AFRICAN AMERICAN SACRED MUSIC TRADITIONS," which began broadcast in 1994 and
won a Peabody Award. Her publications include: We Who Belive in Freedom: Sweet Honey
In The Rock: Still on the Journey (Anchor Books, 1993); "We'll Understand It
Better By and By" : Pioneering African American Gospel Composers (Smithsonian
Press, 1992); and the landmark documentary anthology Voices of the Civil Rights
Movement: Black American Freedom Songs 1960-1965, a three-record collection with
accompanying booklet which she produced for the Smithsonian Collection of Classic
Recordings. She currently resides in Washington, D.C.
Interview
Marvette Pérez: How did your career as a historian, and as a
museum professional start?
Bernice Johnson Reagon:
I was at the Smithsonian for twenty years, and I'm still at the Smithsonian as a curator
emeritus, and I still plan to figure out what that means for me at this point in my life.
That question has multiple angles. I did not follow the ordinary path to be a scholar in a
museum, or even an academic. But there was a trajectory I was on as an African American
child in the community in which I was raised. I can remember my mother saying, "If
you will go to college, you will go." Which meant money was not going to be an issue.
I never knew how she figured she was going to do it with eight children, but she was
determined. And so we all sort of knew in my family that we could go to college. At that
point in our minds, going to college meant finishing undergraduate school and getting a
job as a teacher. We saw our teachers, once they earned their undergraduate degrees and
got their teaching jobs, going back to school every summer until they got their master's.
So almost all of the teachers, of any seniority, say over ten years, had master's degrees.
So one of the things that happened with integration in the South is they found that the
black teachers were much more educated than the white teachers. And that was the way it
went. Now, there was also a slim possibility that if something happened, you might become
a lawyer or a doctor or something. But there was nothing to lay that path open. So, even
if you had potential, you couldn't quite see it. I think the Civil Rights Movement changed
that trajectory for me. The first thing I did was leave school. I was suspended for my
participation in Movement demonstrations in my hometown, December, 1961. For a time I
continued studying, transferring to Spelman College in Atlanta, but after completing one
full semester, it became clear to me that I had to leave school, so I did, November, 1962.
And that was a very important step in my education. When I write my résumé, I
still identify my suspension from school as a part of my education. It was a time when I
left the falsity and the artificiality of the academic campus and really began to study
society by confronting it. It changed everything in terms of how I saw what I had been
studying. And also what I thought the society was and what it was supposed to be for me.
It also reopened the question of who I could be. The Civil Rights Movement was a safety
zone for me, a place where I had as good a chance as anybody else to survive. The Civil
Rights Movement also reaffirmed me as a singer. It taught me that singing was not
entertainment, it was something else. I had all these older people in my life who had
stories about traditional songs we'd used in the movement, but the stories were about the
role those songs played during slavery. And they were resistant struggle stories. So I was
learning about a part of my history that I already had. I already knew the songs, but I
didn't know the stories, and putting them together occurred at the same time we were
fighting racism in the United States. So it was an interesting combination of things. This
was the sixties.
At the same time all this was happening, there was a folk song revival movement
goingon, so the commercial music industry was actually changed by the Civil Rights
Movement. And, as the member of a group called the Freedom Singers, I was dialoguing and
operating in the same environment as people like Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Peter,
Paul and Mary, Odetta. All of these people were trying to figure out ways in which they
could participate in the Civil Rights Movement. At that moment what was going on was both
the contemporary new song and a revival of old songs, and old singers, white and black.
Then the Smithsonian entered the equation with the Folk Festival, designed by a man named
Ralph Rinzler. Rinzler had come into folk music during this revival. He was a brilliant
organizer. He created for the Smithsonian a festival that was almost a rehearsal for a
play. In Black culture, if it is a game, it is considered a sort of entertainment. But
when we say something is a play, it is not just for enjoyment, there is a lesson in the
activity. It is a way to learn something about living, about getting along in the world.
The Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife, actually, was an effort to put
something on the mall in Washington so American tourists could walk through America, and
in their minds everything on the mall would be American. No matter what it looked like, no
matter what the language was, you would walk from this area to that area, to the other
area, to the other area, and everywhere you went, everybody was from America. And it
wasn't your neighborhood. You could go back to your all white neighborhood, and you would
not be taking all of these different kind of people. But maybe, you would actually
remember you had a good time. Ralph Rinzler thought that something could be done about the
anxiety concerning the complexity of the demographic composition in this country. Some
white people are so anxiety-ridden when faced with the truth about this country as a home
to many cultures and races and ethnic groups. They cling to a mythology of a white
America. So anybody who is was not white in their minds is not American. These are just
other people who are in fact messing up the country. And in his construct that was the
Folklife festival, Rinzler tried to combat that mentality. He actually created an
environment where people could experience the multicultural complexity of the nation in a
"play"-like atmosphere.
On the other hand, this festival was considered "artificial" by some
people. The folklorists at that time, (and we are talking about the late sixties), were
saying: "festivals that you study should come up out of the culture." They
didn't like academically trained people creating "artificial" festivals. So this
particular festival initially was criticized by your degreed folklorists as not being
"natural." I personally thought it was an appropriate construct for what a
museum could do for a country. Because you're dealing with the Smithsonian Institution,
it's the national museum of the country. It operates sort of like an attic. It operates by
identifying what the treasures are. It had been archaic, in a nineteenth-century mode,
until Dillon Ripley came in as Secretary of the Smithsonian. There are stories about what
Secretary Ripley found at the Smithsonian Institution when he arrived. There's one story
about that big elephant in the National History museum which was covered with dust. When
asked about the terrible condition, a curator reportedly told Ripley: "they like
dust, they like the dirt." Or the upheaval [Ripley] faced when he put popcorn on the
mall, because children might come. Or when he put in the carousel, because if you put a
carousel on the mall, the children would be playing.
Another memorable event occurred before I came to the Smithsonian formally as a
scholar. In 1968, following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the Poor
People's Campaign came to Washington and created a tent city on the mall. That summer it
rained a lot, and the tent city was a sea of mud. I was living in Atlanta at the time and
came up to do some singing. During the Poor People's campaign, Ripley had pulled together
the heads of the museums and told them that they were going to leave the museums open to
the people on the mall. They were not going to be turned away. The idea of these muddy
people going to the bathrooms of the museums was just...you can imagine!...But it was so
and for me this kind of policy opened a window of opportunity created, in part, I think,
by the Civil Rights Movement.
The first time I came to the Folklife Festival, I remember being particularly
struck by the Native American section. There was corn growing on the mall, right next to
tents. I have to say I never encountered the environmental presentation of culture, where
you work with a group and you tell them to bring their house. Because they didn't just
have a stage; there were tepees, not one, but the tepees were in a circle and then outside
of the tepees was this corn. And I just thought, good Lord! and then right next to it
there were these people from some place like North or South Dakota building a sod house.
I'd never seen a sod-house. During this two weekend festival, if you came every day you
witnessed this house going up right next to the Native American compound.
Then there were Black people from off the islands of Charleston. The Moving Star
Hall Singers whose worship services feature a singing shout style that I had never seen
anywhere else in Black America. And I was absolutely flabbergasted by the range. As I
watched tourists go through it with their children, I thought: "this is an
exhibit." If a museum is trying to look at what a country in as much trouble as we
are in, actually needs, that museum ought to be finding hundreds of different ways for
Americans to walk into a space and go through the exercise of visiting another piece of
America that's not them. I had never been in a museum before the Smithsonian, and I didn't
quite know what a museum was. So, I entered the Smithsonian through the festival, but I
knew the festival was new, experimental, and innovative.. It made me strive to figure out
what a museum was and what a museum could be.
Marvette Pérez: How
did you figure out that the Smithsonian was a place where you would like to work?
Bernice Johnson Reagon:
I came to the Smithsonian because of Rinzler and his work. We had worked together
during the Civil Rights Movement through his position as festival director of the Newport
Folk Festival. The first job I had with the Smithsonian was as a field researcher among
African American communities in Southwest Louisiana and Arkansas for the festival. I began
to work full-time as the festival office began to gear up for a gigantic six month
festival for the country's bicentennial celebration. Gerald Davis, a folklorist and
African American, was the Assistant Director of the festival. And, he was the person who
recommended that I come to work with the Black program which was to be part of the
festival.
One of the central conceptual programs for the bicentennial festival was "Old
Ways in the New World." The idea was to have cultural groups from nations in Europe
and Asia presented on the mall with cultural delegations from American communities of the
same countries. For example, in the case of Italy, there would be a group from the nation
presented on the Mall as a cultural counterpart to cultural participants from
Italian-American communities. The festival organizers had asked themselves and scholars of
folklore, "How are we going to represent Black people?" One suggestion was to
have a presentation of blues as a part of the England-Appalachian program. The line
went--"we could do English Ballads, then have American performing ballads from
Appalachian communities and before moving to bluegrass, we would have a presentation of
blues."
Gerald Davis was in search of a way to present African American culture in its own
right. When we talked, I told him the idea would fit very well, we would just need a
tri-continental statement rather than the two present in the European and Asian examples.
An "Old Ways in the New World" program for Black American culture would have to
have delegations from Africa, the Caribbean, South America, and Black American communities
in the United States. In a meeting with the leading staff of the festival, I was asked by
Jim Morris, head of the Division of Performing Arts, "You want to do this by
yourself, right?" You have to remember that this is 1972 and during the period of
Black nationalism. I responded, "It won't work if we (Blacks) have to do it by
ourselves. It has to be as part of a team or it just won't work". And then I said:
"But, it will be your biggest program, because if I bring twenty-five Africans, and
twenty-five Jamaicans, I'm going to have to have fifty African Americans. And, if another
place has, say, twenty-five Japanese and twenty-five Japanese Americans, which is fifty
people, I will have a hundred, so it's going to cost more."
Academic folklorists consulted about the concept we were developing did not like
the idea. They didn't like the fact that the program would be called "African
Diaspora." "African Diaspora" was not a term in the academy. But it was
already a term in use within the African American community. By this time as I moved to
work on my doctorate, I already knew I wanted to do group history. And I was calling it
oral history at the time. I was not opposed to reading the documents, I was not opposed to
knowing what the leaders were saying, but I did not think either of those things gave you
a history of the way the community base was moving, and that was what I wanted to go
after. When I moved into the Smithsonian, and we are now talking about 1972 (those were
the bicentennial years), I moved in immediately with an attitude that I was going to allow
my work to be directed by what I found through research going on in African American
culture. And if African Americans could not name the program, then the program couldn't
exist. And it didn't matter to me that no academics had used the term "African
Diaspora." But it was a test for me. I said to myself: "If I can't get past
these folklorists and anthropologists and get the Smithsonian to approve "African
Diaspora" as the name of the program I probably could not work at this institution.
Thanks to the vision of Gerald Davis, the African Diaspora project was conceptually
defined by an advisory group of scholars, among that group were African American cultural
scholars who were very fluent with what was going on in contemporary Black America. We,
the members of the staff carried out the program they conceptualized. This structure
allowed me as the staff scholar to do some other things that were crucial to African
American culture, but outside of the boundary of what was considered folklore. I was
occasionally in conflict with Ralph Rinzler who loved traditional folk music but who had a
pretty conventional way of determining what was "traditional." I understood very
early that there was not a clear marker between traditional Black root expressions, forms
evolved from traditions, and revival expression, etc. I wanted an area in the festival
that would go from the oldest forms all the way up to contemporary.
Some of the other folklorists thought gospel too loud, urban blues would unbalance
the sound of the festival environment because it was in its electric expansions
overpowering for more intimate traditional expressions. If we put an urban blues band from
Chicago on our stage, it would blow the ballad stage out of the mall. When I suggested
Clifton Chenier for one of the Cajun bands to be presented, Ralph thought he was a bit too
evolved for the festival. I thought that he was a corollary with Johnny Cash in country
music. We brought in a Pentecostal gospel choir with Hammond organ and electric bass and
guitar. We had the jazz pianist Randy Weston, and he jammed on the mall on a baby grand
piano. It was not ragtime, or honky-tonk, or boogie woogie, it is straight-up jazz. But
the connection for us was that Weston had studied with and collaborated with African
drummers, and we were bringing the drummers from Ghana.
So it was a logical kind of thing to present within the African Diaspora program.
For this, we were attacked by the late Martin Williams who was head of the jazz program in
the Performing Arts division, who said it would be an embarrassment to invite Randy Weston
to come and play his music on the mall with folk musicians. Williams actually got in touch
with Weston and tried to discourage him. Weston told us that he would come anytime we
invited him to participate. He brought his father to the festival. We found that his
father was a Jamaican Maroon and we had a cultural group from the Maroons participating in
the festival at the same time. It was the first time his father had been in an American
environment where he was walking around with Maroons from Jamaica, Kumin, a people from
Jamaica, with a delegation from Ghana and his son Randy Weston playing and all of these
performances being presented to reveal continuities and discontinuities as we have
differently evolved.
For me it was an incredible way to begin a career as a scholar. At the same time I
was trying to negotiate my way through the academy. The festival was a new publication
format for the Smithsonian and for me. It was an experiment, I had a chance to test out
field research by bringing it before a general public. But it was never easy. One day that
first year I came out on the mall for the Folklife Festival, and they had torn down the
market structure of the exhibit that we were having constructed. It seemed that the
structure did not meet building code. In its place they had flown in a three story circus
tent from Chicago. I got to the mall to look at my area, and I looked at this circus tent,
and I asked, " where's our program?" And the grounds manager explained that the
market area was not up to code so they had to take it down because it would be dangerous
for the people. And I said: "well where are we going to have the parade?" The
guy walked me inside the tent, and he said you'll have the parade inside here. (Laugh)
They were going to put us all inside this tent--people, bands, horses, wagons--we were
going to do everything inside this tent. I had no idea that I could do anything about it,
but as I walked out of the tent, Ralph Rinzler rode up in his car. I walked up to the
window and I said to him: "Take It Down!" and I walked off (Laugh). I was as
surprised as anybody the next day when it was gone. And I didn't realize how terrible it
was until after it was down. They were going to put all of the Black people inside of a
three-story circus tent. That would have been our market area, our church stage, our night
life stage, our cooking demonstration, everything was going be in this tent.
There was another time when all of the festival participants were staying in
Georgetown University dormitories. Some of our participants had been doing some drumming
at night. And we were told that the Indians and the Blacks had to stop drumming at twelve
midnight because people had to sleep. And so I went over there one night, and who was
carrying on until three in the morning, but a bluegrass band...they were just playing it
all night long. I went home, and I think I must have had a fever or something, but I
called Ralph, it must have been one o'clock in the morning. And I said: "Ralph, when
we came to this country as slaves, the drums were banned. And I can't work in a program
that bans drums, so we have to drum." So then, we announced that we were going to
start drumming at twelve o'clock midnight. So I get over there and some of the African
drummers started drumming. Then in come the Navajos in full dress, and everybody joined in
and we carried on.
One of the biggest things I understood in a program like that was that it allowed
more young African American scholars to do field research in the Caribbean and in Africa
than had ever happened before in the history of the country and since. At one point we
were criticized for that. There is a report that says: "The staff scholar thinks that
one has to be African American to do research on this project. She will not hire
Africanists, (meaning by "Africanist" anybody who's studying Africa) who are not
African Americans."
Bernice Johnson Reagon
interview continues:
Marvette Pérez: And at that point most Africanists were
white.
Bernice Johnson Reagon: Yes, and Blacks who were coming up in
university departments of folklore and ethnomusicology were not getting any of the grants
to do field research. Therefore their cv's never looked right. And there were whites who
were doing their field research and their dissertation research in Africa, all over the
Caribbean, but Blacks in those same departments had difficulty securing support to do
research outside of the United States. So as a result of our program several African
American scholars were hired to conduct field research in these regions.
M: Did you respond to that report?
B: No, I just prayed they wouldn't fire me. (Laugh) It was true
though, but not for the reasons they said. But I really knew that if there were going to
be research grants for work in these areas, we needed to send talented young Black
scholars to do it. The research opportunities were wonderful because we were able to
provide African American scholars from the United States with the opportunity to do
research with scholars in the countries where they were conducting fieldwork as a part of
a team partnering with a researcher from that country. That design was present throughout
the festival and was the idea of Ralph Rinzler who was determined to bring new people to
the field of cultural research and programming.
M: And you were
sending them to the countries?
B: Yes.
M: Like Jamaica...
B: That's right, so there was an African
American scholar working with a Jamaican scholar. They basically did the research. And
what they were trying to do was to find expressions in Jamaica that had some corollary to
what was present in African American cultural expressions. We found many practices where
the links and continuities could be presented to a lay public. They were very clear. In
culinary traditions for example, one could sample peas and rice from a Ghanaian cook, a
cook from Trinidad and Tobago, and a cook from Georgia, each dish would be different in
some way, but one could experience directly the continuity. The same was true with the
preparation of greens, where there were differences in the meats (pork, fish, or goat),
some of the spices, and what leaves were stewed, but the pot was all based in the African
practice. We had parallel expressions in sacred rituals, in games played by children, in
stories, in woodcarving, in hair preparation, in parading... We were able to create an
environment where visitors could see Black people, American citizens, carrying out
everyday cultural practices that could only be understood within its African context.
M: Were there young scholars who wrote dissertations or who started
their own research projects based on the experiences they had in those countries?
B: In most cases we were using scholars who
already had completed their dissertations, they were able with this experience to gain
more credibility in their fields in a way that was not possible before. Personally I
discovered that you could go through the academy as a young scholar, come out, and almost
immediately have an impact on the academic environment. That is not an easy thing to do
within the academy. If I had been at a University I don't think I would have been able to
have the experience I had in my Smithsonian work. I don't think I have been as successful.
I came out of the Civil Rights Movement, and I had a different kind of focus than most
people who have just the academic background as their primary training experience. Most
people come out of their Ph.D. experience trying to prove themselves, trying to get ahead,
trying to get published. You're scared everybody else is going to do your research and get
your topic. There's this environment that pushes you against your own people, your own
colleagues; there's this competitive edge. I had none of that. I really was not afraid
that anybody else would write something before me. And I just felt like, even if they did,
I'd find something else to write. The Movement was a group experience. The African
Diaspora program was conceptualized by a group. Ralph Rinzler as director of the festival
believed intensively in a team approach. That set up a structure for the way I tried to do
all of my work at the Smithsonian. Every time I created a project, I created a team. The
teams were generally university-based and cross-racial, although most of the scholars I
have worked with have been African Americans. I have always been able to find
university-based scholars and some independent scholars who were more than willing to join
in a concerted effort to do primary research that would result in a national conference, a
data base or/and a publication. And that meant that I was never doing research by myself.
M: Were you working and going to graduate
school at the same time?
B: I started graduate school in 1971, I started working at the
Smithsonian in the festival in 1972. I went full-time at the Smithsonian in 1974. And I
got my doctorate in 1975.
M: Did working at the Smithsonian on the
festival and other projects influence what you later did for your dissertation?
B: When I started graduate school I was interested in the culture of
the Civil Rights Movement. And I wanted to make that work if I could, in terms of the
discipline of history. All through my graduate work, I kept targeting the idea of trying
to work with multiple materials: material culture, oral culture, stories...I did many
independent studies. Howard University was great because it didn't have oral history or
independent studies or interdisciplinary history when I came. It was a fairly
conventional-style history department. They initiated all of those course options the year
I came in. When I did independent study projects that utilized oral expressions or
material culture, I had to take the project through two or three specialists. So I might
have somebody from music, anthropology, and always a historian on the project...What I
realized was that by the time I started working on my dissertation, I already had three or
four projects where I had worked with creating research and writing for a faculty
committee. In the history department, they really wanted to be sure everything I did stood
up in terms of historical methodologies and analysis.
And they also wanted to be sure that if it was anthropology, or if it was music
history, that could stand up too. As the years of work passed at the Smithsonian as a
scholar, I realized that Howard had trained me well for the work I wanted to do. The
department under the leadership of Dr. Lorraine A. Williams made what was then innovative
changes for that department so that we would be prepared to work and function well in
applied history.
M: I ask you that because your work is very
eclectic and very interdisciplinary. And that is not something that you necessarily find
at the Smithsonian all the time. Not everybody does that. And I'm sure at that time it was
rather unusual, to work within the framework of a team with different people from
different disciplines and different perspectives.
B: The team approach is the one that has always made the best sense
to me. The academy doesn't think too much of it. For example, in terms of publications, I
prefer the anthology to the one-person study. I just don't think one person has that much
to contribute to any subject. I mean, if I can't read six angles, I'm suspicious. And
that's what I really learned in trying to present something about the African American
legacy in this land. It makes sense that whatever the topic is, it's more compelling if
you can provide the audience with a range of perspectives, and you can cross disciplines.
And you don't have to control what people take out of it.
M: But that's what scares a lot of people, because it takes away the control,
some of the authority...
B: But to me that control is not important.
M: So how did you happen to be at the National
Museum of American History?
B: The Division of Performing Arts (DPA) was very successful with the
festival and they began to be very successful with recordings. Their first big success
was the jazz collection. It had been out ten years and that collection went gold. Then
they expanded their offerings and recordings. They tried to set up a structure to take
care of the recordings, the marketing and other aspects of it, since not all of the
recordings did or would do as well as that first jazz set did, however they were not
allowed to create such a reserve. So, for example, if the division released a box set, and
it sold, all of the money would immediately go into a general Smithsonian fund. In
1977-79, DPA did have a run of unsuccessful releases or releases that sold below their
projection. As a result, the Division was dismantled, some of us were transferred to other
Smithsonian bureaus. The program I directed then, the Program in Black American Culture
was transferred to the American History museum.
| Bernice Johnson Reagon interview continues: Marvette Pérez: Which
division of the museum did you start at?
Bernice
Johnson Reagon: I went
into Public Programs. There were three people in Public Programs at American History when
I arrived. After we got there, there must have been ten of us making it the largest office
in the museum. And I came over with a small program budget of $50,000. When they moved us
to American History, the Castle [the institution's administrative offices] did not
identify line items for budget allocations. I knew Congress had granted the funds to my
program, but I got no assistance in keeping that allocation for Black American Culture. I
simply had to tell at every turn to my new supervisors, "of the monies you have
received with this transfer of staff, $50,000 is funding that came to my office and it
must stay that way. Of this money, $50,000 is mine, don't touch it." And that was the
beginning of my moving in the museum in a way in which nobody was supposed to move. One of
the things I didn't notice was that my set-up was different from that of every other
scholar in the museum.
M: How so?
B: I didn't notice that I had an office of one scholar with three
support people. We conducted and supervised field research, we produced public programs,
managed an archive, and published papers. There wasn't any other office in the museum set
up with that range of functions. All the other offices might have had two or three
curators, sharing support staff, with public programs and publications having their own
offices. It took me a year before I noticed it, that my shop was odd.
M: Was it that
way when you first came?
B: I designed it
that way. I didn't see any other way to do primary research at the Smithsonian inAfrican
American cultural history and present that research to the public. Because my
firstresponsibility was to the public. It's true I could have done something rehashed, I
could have been a producer, you know: brought in a top writer, brought in a top singer.
But I'm a historian. I wasn't interested in just being a producer, I was interested in
doing research and presenting that research to a general public. So I had to construct a
way for me to be a historian, and also to satisfy the purpose for which I was hired, which
was public programs. So I designed an office where I could do research and somehow present
the primary research and analysis in public programs.
M: So that's how
it got started.
B: That's the way it
started.
M: And it is
still in place today.
B: It is still the
design of the Project in African American Culture.
M: And how did
you keep going with your music career at the same time that you were starting this new job
in a new museum? Because it's astonishing to me that you maintain the level of energy and
the level of production in both areas, to this day.
B: Well, I think I
paid tremendously for what I did. Sweet Honey and my work at the Smithsonian began at the
same time; they're the same age. And they were really compatible. During the early years
it was so new to have an initiative in African American Culture at the Smithsonian that it
was a battle cry on every possible level. Everything you can think of happened to me as a
young scholar. And you know, if you are a historian, writing history on paper, there is a
way in which you won't dialogue with your colleagues until it's on paper and you send it
around. But when you're dealing with flesh and blood, there's something else that happens.
It was a very intense experience to do work at the Smithsonian. I had to really try to
understand what research was, what analysis was, and what I was finding, because sometimes
the criticism I was receiving from my colleagues was academically grounded and
intellectually grounded, and sometimes it was just up-front racism that you would find any
place in America, and sometimes it was just fear. People were not used to finding an
African American statement.
One of the most wonderful things that happened to me as a scholar was that one of
the folklorists who had said about our festival program for the bicentennial, "you
can't do this concept and apply it to African Americans," came to the program and
said, "I opposed this, but I was wrong, this absolutely worked." That was
really, really great. But others would bring people there to look at what we were doing to
actually say it was bad so that they could justify eliminating it. There's one very
critical report from that first year festival in 1974. Coming to American History, I had
come out of that kind of experience, so American History was actually calmer for me.
M: But then at
the same time you started your music.
B: I organized Sweet
Honey In The Rock in 1973. The music was sanity and balance. If you go through the kind of
intensity I worked in for five days of the week, you need to be somebody else, or you
can't go through the next five days. So if I did Monday through Friday at the Smithsonian,
Saturday and Sunday I was a member of Sweet Honey In The Rock. I was inside of a community
of Black women, and we were singing in front of audiences. That could be a struggle too
because during the same period we were singing in front of Black audiences and especially
women audiences that were not accustomed to Black women artists. So we had another kind of
battle ground there. It was a very healing thing, to be with and inside Sweet Honey.
It was challenging to create and maintain the structure that was Sweet Honey
because there were not many models for what we were doing at the time we were doing it. I
did have the model of quartets that worked all day and rehearsed one night a week and sang
on the weekend. And I have the example of Pete Seeger who made a working career of being a
socially conscious artist, making his music work for issues he believed in. I had the
direct experience of being introduced to the concert stage as a Freedom Singer. And Sweet
Honey drew upon all of that and more. The group saved my life and it made it possible for
me to work at the Smithsonian. People would say to the women in Sweet Honey: "Why
aren't you singers full-time? And we would say, "Why should we be? Why should we
choose between areas of work that we love to do, that combined makes us whole."
Sweet Honey is now twenty-three years old, and May 30th, 1996, I resigned as
artistic director. And now we have a new design. The change had to come because I couldn't
hold it together anymore because it was so much bigger after twenty years than it had been
at five or ten. In fact when Sweet Honey was ten years old it was too big for me to run,
and I knew it, but I ran it for another thirteen years because I couldn't convince other
people to really do it. And this year, I'm not running it.
M: Who runs it
now?
B: There is a
collective artistic directorship, and we hired an executive director. So, I've been
replaced by six people (laugh). And one of the six people is me. I'm part of the
collective artistic directorship. It's wonderful to sit up at a meeting that somebody else
called. And sometimes I get on the phone to ask where the rehearsal is going to take place
and who's running it this week, because I don't know, and I don't have to know.
M: But it must
have been quite a level of intensity when you were doing both, especially after ten or
fifteen years.
B: Yes, I've had
young people ask me how was I able to do so much. And I suggest that I'm not a good model,
it really was over-extension. It's not a normal life to do what I did. But people who are
oppressed cannot live a "normal" life. Baby, you try to live a normal life if
you're oppressed, you will never be free. I don't think a slave can live a normal life if
you want to end slavery. I think you have to over-extend yourself. When Sweet Honey was
twelve years old, and I'd been at the Smithsonian for twelve years, I actually was
diagnosed with fibroids. And the doctor said, "these things look like they're
about...I'd say you've had these for about twelve years." (Laugh). So, I deal with my
fibroids, I call them Sweet Honey/Smithsonian fibroids. And you pay, you pay. You know,
I'm overweight, I have arthritis. And one day, after ten years at Smithsonian and ten
years with Sweet Honey, I thought I had to change. And I remember the pain coming into my
mind when I said to myself "you can't keep up this pace for another five years."
And I started to try to change. And to try to get more support in all of the different
areas. With this last shift of Sweet Honey, I really have made some structural changes. If
I had not moved out of directing the Program in African American Culture to being a
curator at American History, I would not have been able to do "Wade in the
Water."
| Bernice Johnson Reagon interview continues: Marvette Pérez: What year
did you move into a curatorial position?
Bernice Johnson Reagon: I
became a curator in 1988.
M: And how did
that come about?
B: It was Roger
Kennedy, the previous director of the Museum of American History. I think Roger understood at some point that I needed to think about
something else, and that something else was administration. At the time he talked to me
about it, I didn't want to be involved in the administration at the museum. I still was
committed to African American culture. I have always been an administrator, but I've
always tried to do a little research on the side. And I felt if I went into curatorship, I
might be able to drop the administration and only do research. I realized there would be a
downside, because I had to pull myself out of that office--out of my team--and I entered a
department or a division, where I was on my own. But I thought it was something I needed
to do, and I think it was a very good move. I also was very lucky because a year after I
made that move, I received the MacArthur Award which actually gave me a funding base to
consolidate some things for me, in terms of my work as a scholar.
M: Do you feel
the position of curator gave you an opportunity to do collecting and other kinds of work
that the museum had not been involved in doing before, like the interest you've taken in
gospel music, and African American communities in the south?
B: I came into the
curatorial position with an already developed archive. The Office of Public Programs had
no archival responsibilities. The Division of Performing Arts that I'd been in, had no
archive. We were not supposed to have an archive, but it seemed irresponsible not to try
to document what we were doing so we did it. When I became a curator, the collection moved
to the Archives Center with special funding to catalogue it. I saw John Fleckner [Director
of the Archives Center of the National Museum of American History] not too long ago and he
said that people are making use of that collection.
When I first came into the Division of Community Life as a curator, I remember the
collections manager saying to me: "here, we are interested in collecting
three-dimensional objects," and I thought, oh, here I go again. Why can't I just go
someplace and just do what everybody else is doing? I remember when I asked for a
promotion. They have a peer review committee, and I talked to the chairman of the
committee, and he said "this is interesting, I wonder how people are going to look at
this." And the whole issue was that my work did not look like anything they we re
used to evaluating: it did not fit the usual curatorial categories.
I'm in the academy now, as Distinguished Professor of History at American
University. I am sometimes asked in passing by my colleagues, "what are you
writing?" And I say: "nothing!," you know, or "I'm writing
proposals." Then they ask: "Well, what are you working on?" and I say:
"I've been working on this exhibit for three years. And it's stuck because we can't
get it funded." That's not an easy conversation that one historian can have with
another.
M: How do your colleagues react to your
National Public Radio series "Wade in the Water?"
B: I think there are
some historians who understand it. They understand it as a publication, as primary
research, because the radio series feels like an anthology, since there were thirteen
scholars involved. And if you listen to the radio series, I operate like a conceptualizer
and editor. Other colleagues admit it is good solid research, and they comment that the
publication that accompanies the series is a good anthology, but they still ask: "But
when are you going to do your monograph?" And, so, it doesn't quite make it for them.
One of the things I encourage them to understand is that the world is changing. Students
who are studying history, even though they are going to have to contend with a world in
which information still continues to be transmitted through the printed word, are also
going to have to become fluent in some of the mediums I've been working in.
M: How do you
think your presence at the Smithsonian and now at American University havechanged the ways
in which other historians and other scholars (including museum people) look at their work
and at the historical enterprise?
B: I am not sure
what impact I have on my peers.
M: Not even among
your colleagues at the Smithsonian?
B: I'm not sure. Unfortunately, I think that for my colleagues I have
been an aberration, so one way to deal with me is to say, "Oh!, that's Bernice
Reagon," (Laugh), not, "Gosh!, that's the direction we need to be taking."
I'm not sure how much of the second is happening. I feel the impact much more when I'm at
international conferences. I did the keynote address for the oral history international
conference two years ago. And especially in Brazil and South Africa and Italy, I had
exchanges with people who were struggling as intellectuals, trying to apply their training
to issues that were coming up in their cultures. These were historians getting involved in
resolving historical wounds in their communities, and helping governments to figure out
methodologies to apply as they move forward into the future. They would use history and
historians to validate people's experiences, to try to unload some of the excesses that
have actually happened. Wonderful stuff, just incredible stuff, on the international
level.
M: But not here?
B: If I go to
conferences and there are Latino historians or Native American scholars, or Asian American
scholars, immediately it happens. I find that these people are thinking and trying things
in the same way. So there is a level at which some of us who come into the academy really
are trying to find new ways to do our work. There is a dialogue going on. But I'm not sure
whether we are being cocooned in our little departments, or whether we really are having
an impact on our departments. I think that will be for the future to know.
I place more weight, I think, on my work with younger scholars. It's great
occasionally to work with students who seem also to be interested in the complexity of the
world in which they have to work as scholars. And who are defining their specialties in a
way that allows them to see...and they're not in shock about it. So, I think that will be
the key in terms of any impact I can have. I think I'm setting up models. And I'm trying
to set them up in such a way that people can't erase them.
M: The whole
issue here is the way so many people in the academy view the kind of work youhave done in
your life as incompatible with "real" scholarship. I was struck by what you were
saying before about people expecting you to have that book instead of anthologies. I mean,
there are certain kinds of products that are supposed to be part of what an academic is,
and there is a certain kind of knowledge that you are supposed to have. And a lot of
minority academics don't have either the role models or the mentors who can tell them what
to expect if this is the path thatyou want to take.
B: Young historians
who are coming into departments now are having a big problem with that; if they want to go
to the academy, and follow the same old tired ways, write the books they think people
expect them to write. I'm able to say that's passé. That is absolutely passé. The best
books I use for my courses tend to be the anthologies. There is an intellectual prowess
that is possible, really brilliant, in the way a group of scholars can come together and
present us with a new way of looking at a topic, and it is of immense service to younger
people who are in the department. But it will be interesting to see how these issues will
affect people's chances for tenure.
M: And there are
places where they want to eliminate tenure altogether. And a lot of younger academics are
not getting tenure-track jobs.
B: Yes.
M: Which leads me
to the question, How do you see the future of minority academics and museum professionals
within the next ten years?
B: I think we're in
trouble. I came through the academy. I entered Howard in 1971. At that point, Ford had
sixty doctoral fellowships they gave away every year, from the undergraduate through to
the dissertation level. That program went for at least a decade, and then it was closed
out. And closing that program was another way of keeping us out. There was graduate
funding for top Hispanic undergraduates to go on to graduate degrees. Those programs no
longer exist. And if you look at the representation of minority groups in Ph.D. programs
you actually find that the numbers are down. So I think there are some serious problems in
terms of maintaining anything like the numbers we had a decade and a half ago. I don't
think I'm being replaced.
| Bernice Johnson Reagon interview concludes: Marvette Pérez: It also
seems to be harder these days to do certain programs because of the watchful eye of many
different institutions and governmental bodies. A t least at the National Museum of
American History, they're always paying attention now to what you say you want to do. They
are afraid of any exhibit or project that looks the least bit controversial.
Bernice Johnson Reagon: I've always considered that a challenge. I don't think we are getting young people who have the
training, (which you don't get in the academy), to organize, be a diplomat and be a
politician. But I also don't think you can be successful without those skills. I was
trained in the Civil Rights Movement. Where do young people today get the training to be
able to operate in a very political situation, and not be frozen by the intensity of it?
Because nobody's really going to help you figure out that, this is the way the world is.
And your test is, can you do a piece of work that you recognize? At the Smithsonian I felt
that every five years they closed down whatever program I was in and moved me to another
place, and I had to start from zero. Now under circumstances like that you can give up, or
you can just say, "I don't care where you put me, I'm going to do the same thing I
was doing somehow." So every time I got moved, I just said: "Okay, I can't do
the festival no more, what are we going to do now?" And then, it would just take me a
little while and I would just start to do it. That would floor most people coming through
now. You know, most people would not have been able to survive the move from the festival
to American History, or the move from the Project in African American History to a
curatorial position in the Department of Social and Cultural History. You have to be able
to do it. But in order to do it, you have to know what your real work is. The wonderful
thing about being at the Smithsonian is that you're hired at the Smithsonian because of
your specialty. It is important for you to understand that part of your work is to assist
the institution in determining the scope of its work in the area in which you are trained.
You become the Smithsonian's voice for that particular specialty. Sometimes, there is
difficulty for young scholars who have supervisors who are not skilled in allowing a
modicum of respect and intellectual freedom for one to define and do a job.
M: But if you don't have the skilled supervisor, you have to take it upon
yourself to deal with that.
B: You have to negotiate your space, and you have to be ready to
challenge. At some point at the Smithsonian I said, you know, I didn't hire me, I' m not
going to fire me; that leaves a space between. And in this space, I have to do what I
think I should be doing. I don't ever want to get fired because I'm trying to do what
somebody else wants me to do. I would just be so upset if I was trying to do what somebody
else wanted me to do and I didn't get it right and they dismissed me. But if they dismiss
me when I am trying to do what I fee l I'm trained and I was hired to do, that's a very
different thing.
M: So how do you deal with people who assume that they can improve your work,
"this is the way this should go or this is the way you should do that." Because
I find that if you are a minority academic or curator, other people have a lot of
assumptions about who you are or should be. And sometimes that can be a little
constraining because you're trying to navigate this area that they're trying to construct
for you. You're told at one and the same time that you're the expert on Latino culture or
African American history, and that this is what they think you should do.
B: Most of the time, I constructed my own spaces, and what I outlined
for myself was five times more than anybody else was doing in their spaces. I'll never
forget when my supervisor looked at my performance appraisal sheet, and he said: "you
know you're doing three times more than anybody else." And I just said: "what
should I do, should I erase some of the stuff . . . ?" And that has to with
productivity, but also, I think that came from feeling that I was bringing into the
Smithsonian the legacy of African American culture and history, and wanting to do that
with as much intensity and density as I could.
M: Thank you.
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