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Release date: Dec. 9, 2004 Emory Celebrates Martin Luther King Jr. Week Jan. 17-23Emory University's celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Week is highlighted by keynote speaker Bernice Johnson Reagon, founder of Sweet Honey in the Rock and curator emeritus at the Smithsonian Institution. Brown's lecture, "Over My Head, I Hear Music in the Air: In Song and in the Struggle," will be Tuesday, Jan. 18 at 7:30 p.m. in Cannon Chapel, 515 Kilgo Circle, Emory. This event is free and open to the public. For more information on this and other King Week events, call 404-727-4148. An Emmy-winning performer and composer, Reagon founded the female a cappella quintet Sweet Honey in the Rock in 1973. The group performs traditional African and African-American music and has released 14 albums, including the most recent, “twenty-five.” She has provided scores and performances for numerous film productions, including the award-winning PBS programs “Eyes on the Prize” and ‘We Shall Overcome.” Reagon was the principle scholar, conceptual producer and host of the Smithsonian Peabody Award-winning radio series “Wade in the Water: African American Sacred Music Traditions.” Reagon’s music was her entrance into activism. As a student at Albany State College in Albany, Ga., she was arrested for participating in a Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee demonstration. She discovered during that night spent singing in her jail cell that music was a tool for civil action. “I learned that if you bring black people together, you bring them together with a song,” Reagon says. “To this day, I don’t understand how people think they can bring anybody together without a song.” In addition to her accomplished musical career, Reagon is an historian and scholar. She was a curator at the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American history from 1988-93. She also has held professorships in history and fine arts at American University and her alma mater, Spelman College. She has been the editor and a contributing author for “We’ll Understand It Better By and By: African-American Pioneering Gospel Composers” and “We Who Believe in Freedom: Sweet Honey in the Rock…Still on the Journey.” Reagon is the recipient of many awards, including the Presidential Medal, a MacArthur Fellowship, the Charles Frankel Prize for outstanding contribution to public understanding of the humanities, and the Isadora Duncan Award for the score of the ballet “Rock.” In 2000, she was the first recipient of the Leeway Foundation’s Leeway Laurel, given biannually to “a woman who inspires others, both as an artist and as a person.” According to Leeway founder Linda Lee Alter, “Reagon’s accomplishments, from civil rights activism to the preservation of African-American culture, are so important, and her energy is so impressive, that she was the overwhelming choice of our selection committee.” Other popular events taking place during King Week include a volunteer tree planting in the Martin Luther King Jr. historic district, a jazz vespers service at Cannon Chapel and a student tribute to King in song, dance and spoken word. The schedule of activities follows. All events are free and open to the public. Jan. 17 Jan. 18 Keynote Address Jan. 19 Concert and Birthday Cake Celebration Jan. 20 Jazz Vespers Service Jan. 21 Performance International Student Coffee Hour Panel Discussion Jan. 23 ### Emory University is known for its demanding academics, outstanding undergraduate college of arts and sciences, highly ranked professional schools and state-of-the-art research facilities. For more than a decade Emory has been named one of the country's top 25 national universities by U.S. News & World Report. In addition to its nine schools, the university encompasses The Carter Center, Yerkes National Primate Research Center and Emory Healthcare, a comprehensive metropolitan health care system. |
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