59 Quotes by Bernice Johnson Reagon

There is nowhere you can go and only be with people who are like you. Give it up.

And I used to think that proof that I had religion was whether I knew how to sing all of the songs.

I organized Sweet Honey In The Rock in 1973. The music was sanity and balance.

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.

I just don't think one person has that much to contribute to any subject

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

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.

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

I learned that if you bring black people together, you bring them together with a song. To this day, I don't understand how people think they can bring anybody together without a song.