Education Quote by Bernice Johnson Reagon

The power here is how casually Reagon stacks credentials like stepping-stones, not trophies. The sentence is built like a timeline you can march to: 1971, 1972, 1974, 1975. It reads less like autobiography than like a quiet audit of seriousness. In four short beats, she shows an arc from student to institutional insider to credentialed expert, and she does it without pausing for self-congratulation. That restraint matters: coming from a Black woman musician whose authority was often presumed to be “folk” or “performative,” the plainness becomes the point. She’s not asking to be taken seriously. She’s documenting that she already was.

The subtext is a rebuttal to a culture that loves artists until they start sounding like scholars, and loves scholars until they admit they’re also artists. Reagon refuses the split. Graduate school, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, full-time work, a doctorate: each station signals a different kind of legitimacy, and she claims all of them in one breath. The repetition of “I started” also frames her career as self-directed motion, not a lucky break or an institutional rescue.

Context sharpens it: the early 1970s are peak aftermath of the civil rights movement, when museums and universities were scrambling to “include” living Black culture while still controlling the narrative. Reagon’s timeline reads like someone walking into that machinery, learning how it runs, and getting certified to change what it produces.