Words matter. These are the best Bernice Johnson Reagon Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
I organized Sweet Honey In The Rock in 1973. The music was sanity and balance.
If every moment is sacred, and If you are amazed and in awe most of the time when you find yourself breathing and not crazy, then you are in a state of constant thankfulness, worship and humility.
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.
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.
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.
There is nowhere you can go and only be with people who are like you. Give it up.
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.
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.
When I started graduate school I was interested in the culture of the Civil Rights Movement.
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.
And I used to think that proof that I had religion was whether I knew how to sing all of the songs.
I went to a church where you could not sing out loud in the service until you had been saved.
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.
The voice I have now, I got the first time I sang in a movement meeting, after I got out of jail… and I’d never heard it before in my life.
Life’s challenges are not supposed to paralyze you, they’re supposed to help you discover who you are.
Well, the first time I ran into the term religion, people were asking whether you had any. You know, some people had religion and some people didn’t have religion.
