Aging & Wisdom Quote by Bernice Johnson Reagon

There is a special kind of exhaustion you only hear from builders: the people who didn’t just join a movement, they kept it standing with their own hands long after it should have had more hands. Bernice Johnson Reagon isn’t dramatizing burnout here; she’s staging a quiet indictment of how cultural institutions love charismatic founders right up until the moment they need shared responsibility. Sweet Honey in the Rock becomes “too big” at ten years old, yet she keeps running it for thirteen more. That arithmetic is the point: growth without infrastructure is just a longer sentence.

The line “I couldn’t convince other people to really do it” lands like a bruise. “Really” carries the whole subtext: plenty of folks were willing to support in name, celebrate the art, benefit from the prestige, maybe even show up. Fewer were willing to absorb the unglamorous labor of leadership. Reagon, coming out of the Black freedom struggle where collective work was survival, frames that failure as both personal and structural: when institutions depend on a singular engine, they’re also revealing who is allowed to step back and who is expected to carry.

“And this year, I’m not running it” isn’t a retirement announcement so much as a boundary drawn in public. The repetition of “run” underlines the relentlessness: not “direct,” not “guide,” but sprint. It’s a musician speaking in the language of tempo and endurance, refusing the myth that devotion should be indefinite. The intent feels bluntly practical: if the work matters, it must outgrow the founder’s body. If it can’t, it was never as collective as it claimed.