Justice & Law Quote by Bernice Johnson Reagon

Graduate school is where big social movements often get shrink-wrapped into “topics,” and Bernice Johnson Reagon’s line quietly resists that flattening. “I was interested in the culture” sounds like a polite academic preface, but coming from a musician who helped build the soundtrack of the Civil Rights Movement, it’s also a sly claim: the movement wasn’t just law and leadership, it was people making meaning in real time. Reagon isn’t pointing first to speeches or court cases. She’s pointing to the lived circuitry that kept the struggle coherent day after day: songs, church basements, mass meetings, the way voices braided into a shared nerve.

The intent is strategic. By framing her entry point as “culture,” she legitimizes what institutions tend to treat as decoration. In many classrooms, culture gets filed under “soft” evidence; Reagon implies it’s infrastructure. Music isn’t commentary from the sidelines, it’s organizing technology: it teaches cadence, discipline, courage, and group memory. “Interested” also underplays the stakes, a modest verb that masks proximity and authority. She’s not a distant observer “studying” the movement; she’s someone who has been inside the mechanism, translating it without draining it of heat.

Context matters: Reagon bridges activism and scholarship, a Black woman navigating spaces that often demanded neutrality as the price of credibility. The subtext is a refusal to separate knowledge from participation. If you want to understand the Civil Rights Movement, she suggests, stop looking only for policy outcomes and start listening for how a people taught themselves to stay unafraid.