Never Before Seen Interview with Bernice Johnson Reagon

A great American has left us. We’ll let others more fully eulogize the amazing accomplishments of singer, activist, and scholar Bernice Johnson Reagon (1942–2024). We at WashU Libraries thank her for her music and for showing us how art can inspire social change. We are honored to play a small part in preserving her legacy. 

We have a number of archival interviews with her in two collections in the Film and Media Archive. The previously accessible interview is from the first series of the famed documentary on the Civil Rights era, Eyes on the Prize, which can be viewed here.

The interview comes from our Henry Hampton Collection. In 1988, Henry Hampton, the executive producer of Eyes on the Prize, praised Johnson for sharing her expertise on the use of music during the Civil Rights Movement with the series’ producers. He called it one of the three main factors in the show’s success. 

We have another interview in our archive that has never been seen before, and it is now available for viewing. In January 1982, former SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) member and educator Jean Wiley interviewed Johnson Reagon. Wiley was working with documentarian Jack Willis on a film to be called The Civil Rights Project. It was never completed.

In this first half of the interview, Wiley and Johnson Reagon discuss her upbringing in rural Georgia, how she joined the movement in the early 1960s, her first march, and how she and other activists sang songs when they were jailed after a protest.

Please note: the full interview is around 76 minutes. The second half of the interview is still being restored because an error in the original audio recording will require frame-by-frame syncing of picture and sound. 

This interview is one of almost 100 film and audio interviews that Jack Willis and Jean Wiley conducted for the film. The WashU Libraries is in the middle of a project funded by the Council of Library and Information Resources to digitize and restore all the interviews. They will be available online for research and edutainment later this year.