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Bernice Johnson Reagon, Civil Rights Activist and Founder of Sweet Honey in the Rock, Dead at 81

Bernice Johnson, an activist and founder of the acapella group Sweet Honey in the Rock, died at age 81.

Bernice Johnson Reagon, civil rights song leader and co-founder of The Freedom Singers who later started the acapella ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock, has died at the age of 81. In the Sixties, Johnson Reagon was a central part of the African American struggle for civil rights, starting her work in her hometown of Albany, Georgia, while enrolled in college, where protests and marches were often accompanied by mass arrests. “As a singer and activist in the Albany Movement, I sang and heard the freedom songs and saw them pull together sections of the Black community at times when other means of communication were ineffective,” she said on NPR’s Fresh Air.

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