Justice & Law Quote by Bernice Johnson Reagon

Reagon’s line has the breezy timing of someone who lived through a seismic shift and is still a little stunned that people treat it like a footnote. She refuses the neat museum labels: “folk revival” over here, “Civil Rights Movement” over there. Her point is that these weren’t parallel storylines; they were entangled supply chains of feeling, attention, and power.

The specific intent is corrective. Reagon is pushing back on the industry myth that music evolves because tastemakers “discover” authentic sounds on their own schedule. By anchoring “commercial music” to the Civil Rights Movement, she recasts the marketplace as responsive, even vulnerable, to mass political pressure. Protest didn’t just inspire songs; it rearranged what could be sold, who could be heard, and what audiences were suddenly willing to buy into.

The subtext is sharper: the industry didn’t altruistically widen its ears. It adapted. As televised marches and freedom songs made Black collective struggle legible to mainstream viewers, “folk” became a kind of cultural passport - a style that could carry moral seriousness into clubs, campuses, and record stores. That portability created opportunity and distortion at once: radical material could travel farther, but it could also be repackaged, sanitized, and monetized by people safer to market.

Context matters because Reagon isn’t speaking as a distant commentator. She’s a musician-activist who understands music as infrastructure: a tool for organizing, a rehearsal space for solidarity, and a public language that can force institutions to respond. Her claim isn’t nostalgic. It’s a reminder that when movements change the air, the industry’s “taste” changes with it.