Bernice Johnson Reagon Quotes

Life's challenges are not supposed to paralyze you, they're supposed to help you discover who you are.

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 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.

If you're in a coalition and you're comfortable, you know it's not a broad enough coalition.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.