Introduction
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.