Reagon and Seeger at the Poor People’s Campaign: 1968
Image by Washington Area Spark
Bernice Johnson Reagon and Pete Seeger perform at Resurrection City near the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. during the Poor People’s Campaign in May 1968.
The Poor People’s Campaign was initially conceived by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King as a massive campaign of civil disobedience that would force the issue of economic justice in the United States.
However, King was assassinated and the planning for the protest by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference toned down the demonstration to token civil disobedience that was conducted May-June 1968.
A semi-permanent camp of plywood mini-houses was constructed near the Lincoln Memorial called Resurrection City where many of the protesters lived.
Persistent rain turned the area into a swamp and authorities used the pretext of crime and sanitary conditions to clear Resurrection City June 24, 1968. A small group of protesters continued demonstrations for several weeks after before disbanding.
The group did not achieve its aims and the country quickly began to go the other direction with social programs slashed and the minimum wage falling further and further behind a living wage.
Reagon gained prominence as a civil rights activist with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and as a member of the singing group organized by SNCC, the Freedom Singers that performed at civil rights demonstrations across the country.
She married Cordell Reagon, another SNCC activist and member of the Freedom Singers in 1963. The two have a daughter, Tosh, who also has a singing career.
In 1973 Reagon founded a six-member, all-female a cappella group called Sweet Honey in the Rock. Parallel to her music career, Reagon had a distinguished academic career
She held an appointment as Distinguished Professor of History at American University (AU) in Washington DC from 1993 to 2003. Reagon has since been named Professor Emerita of History at AU, and holds the title of Curator Emeritus at the Smithsonian.
Seeger was an American folk singer and left-wing social activist. A fixture on nationwide radio in the 1940s, he also had a string of hit records during the early 1950s as a member of the Weavers, most notably their recording of Lead Belly’s "Goodnight, Irene", which topped the charts for 13 weeks in 1950.
Members of the Weavers were blacklisted during the McCarthy Era. In the 1960s, Seeger re-emerged on the public scene as a prominent singer of protest music in support of international disarmament, labor, civil rights, counterculture, and environmental causes until his death in 2014..
A prolific songwriter, his best-known songs include "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" (with Joe Hickerson), "If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song)" (with Lee Hays of the Weavers), and "Turn! Turn! Turn!", which have been recorded by many artists both in and outside the folk revival movement.
Information on Reagon and Seeger’s biographies has been partially excerpted from Wikipedia.
For more information and related images, see flic.kr/s/aHskrqbSDg
Photograph by Diana Davies. The image is from a contact sheet from Diana Davies Photographs, Series 11: Social Justice, courtesy of the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage.
