Education Quote by Bernice Johnson Reagon

Reagon frames “a song” less as decoration than as infrastructure: the thing that makes gathering possible, durable, and safe. Her first clause, “I learned,” signals lived instruction rather than theory, the kind you earn in churches, organizing meetings, picket lines, and long rides where nerves are high and the stakes are real. In Black communal life, song isn’t a perk; it’s a technology for coordination and care. It syncs breath, steadies fear, and creates a shared tempo when people have every reason to fracture under pressure.

The subtext is a quiet indictment of coalition talk that treats unity as a memo. Reagon’s “To this day, I don’t understand” isn’t naivete; it’s a refusal to accept bloodless ideas of togetherness. She’s pointing at the way movements and institutions often try to “bring people together” through speeches, branding, or policy bullet points, while ignoring the embodied practice that actually builds trust. Song is memory you can carry in your body. It’s portable culture, a way to transmit history and discipline without needing permission from a podium.

Context matters: Reagon comes out of the civil rights movement and the freedom-singing tradition, and later helped professionalize that lineage without sterilizing it. Her claim is also about power. Music makes a “we” audible before it’s legible to outsiders. It forms community not by smoothing difference, but by giving people a shared ritual for holding it. When she insists you can’t gather without a song, she’s arguing that solidarity has to be felt, not just declared.