Bernice Johnson Reagon, founder of the female a cappella ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock, headlines a benefit concert for Men Stopping Violence May 17. (Photo courtesy of Men Stopping Violence)
Fighting against violence Men Stopping Violence, ‘Sweet Honey’ founder use songs to help end oppression
MORE INFO: Listening to Women’s Voices
May 17, 8 p.m.
Unitarian Universalist Congregation
1911 Cliff Valley Way, $27
404-270-9894, menstoppingviolence.org
WHEN YOU MAKE A CAREER OUT OF singing about oppression, it seems easy to feel fatigued or overwhelmed — constantly outpaced by the new and creative ways humans judge and stratify one another.
But after more than 40 years of singing about social justice and the need for change, and after being arrested and seeing churches in southwest Georgia burned to the ground, Bernice Johnson Reagon remains hopeful. Early in her life, the thought-provoking singer-songwriter lent her voice to the black civil rights movement, and she’s encouraged that oppressed people across the globe continue to glean lessons from the African-American experience in the U.S.
“People take inspiration from that struggle, and they see it as a real opportunity, in terms of organized human culture, to say that you do not have to live and die in an environment that does not support you, or in a an environment that does not respect you,” Reagon says. “You do not always get a result you are going for, but something happens because you have announced and articulated a need for a changed agenda.”
Reagon headlines the May 17 “Listening to Women’s Voices” benefit concert for Men Stopping Violence, which also features a performance by local lesbian singer Doria Roberts. Among Reagon’s musical contributions to a more just world is the lesbian-popular, Grammy Award-winning a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock, which Reagon founded in 1973.
She also participated in a groundbreaking interracial concert tour across the south with the late folk singer Anne Romaine, with the pair performing in places like Tuskegee, Ala., Jackson, Miss., and Hazard, Ky.
“On these southern campuses, the southern white campuses, there were small groups of faculty and students who wanted to participate in a beyond-racial south,” Reagon says. “It was an extraordinary experience.”
INSTEAD OF OFFERING LIP SERVICE IN support of equal rights, the white people who recruited Reagon and Romaine to perform on their campuses were actively seeking diversity and initiating change, Reagon says.
A similar dynamic often takes place at Men Stopping Violence, a local non-profit dedicated to ending male violence against women. Gay and bisexual men are among the leadership and interns at Men Stopping Violence, even though gay men might be considered less likely to engage in domestic violence against women.
“When men begin to embrace this work, they begin to learn a lot about themselves,” says Sulaiman Nuriddin, men’s intervention program manager at Men Stopping Violence.
In addition to ending physical violence against women, Men Stopping Violence training programs are designed to dismantle the patriarchal, masculine-centric norms that allow violence against women to fester, Nuriddin says.
“It’s not until we’ve been faced with these issues that we begin to recognize, ‘Oh, wow — I’m doing some of those same things, too,’” says Nuriddin, who is heterosexual. “I feel like a lot of the gay men who come to our training find it a very rewarding situation.”
While focusing on eliminating male violence against women, Nuriddin’s group also partners with groups like the Women’s Resource Center to try to confront many of the same issues that inspire domestic violence in lesbian relationships.
“We have all been socialized in a male-dominated, patriarchal society, and I don’t think that socialization stops with men,” Nurridin says, noting that patriarchy is intimately linked with “issues of power, and control, and dominance over another person.”
REAGON’S UPCOMING PERFORMANCE AT the Men Stopping Violence benefit is a bit of a homecoming. As a young adult, Reagon was exiled to Atlanta after her civil rights work left her jobless and suspended from Albany State College in southwest Georgia.
She was one of 500 Albany State students arrested during two days of marches on campus in 1961, and was fired from her cleaning job at a white beauty parlor after daring to try to access Albany’s all-white library. She never made it through the library door, but her picture made the local newspaper.
Facing the “most invigorating” dilemma of her young life, Reagon moved to Atlanta where she enrolled in Spelman College and joined the Freedom Singers, the musical wing of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Reagon soon recognized that music was one of the most powerful and inspiring weapons in the fight for equal rights.
“As a singer, I was always with a group who were song leaders — we would start a song, but we would never finish it,” Reagon says. “You start a song, and you are just swamped by the rest of the people who join in singing.”
The
following comments were posted by our readers and were
not edited by SOVO. We ask that you
treat others with respect; any post deemed offensive will
be removed.
