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

... click here for full text of this article.