According to the Internet source given below, Bernice Johnson Reagon (née Johnson) is an American song leader, composer, scholar, and social activist. In the early 1960s was a founding member of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee's (SNCC) Freedom Singers in the Albany Movement in Georgia. In 1973, she founded the all-black female a cappella ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock, based in Washington, D.C. Along with other members of the SNCC Freedom Singers, she realized the power of collective singing to unify the disparate groups who began to work together in the 1964 Freedom Summer protests in the South.
She earned her Ph.D. from Howard University becoming a cultural historian, centered on the role of music, and is an emeritus faculty member in the History Department at The American University. She has also been a scholar-in-residence at Stanford and received an honorary doctorate of music from Berklee College of Music.

Websites:
	Bernice Johnson Reagon	Biography by wikipedia.org.
	Sam Cooke	Biography by wikipedia.org.