American - Musician | October 4, 1942 -
Life's challenges are not supposed to paralyze you, they're supposed to help you discover who you are.
Bernice Johnson Reagon
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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.
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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.
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There is nowhere you can go and only be with people who are like you. Give it up.
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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.
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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.
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The first job I had with the Smithsonian was as a field researcher among African American communities in Southwest Louisiana and Arkansas for the festival.
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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.
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I went to a church where you could not sing out loud in the service until you had been saved.
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And I used to think that proof that I had religion was whether I knew how to sing all of the songs.
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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.
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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.
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