Life's challenges are not supposed to paralyze you, they're supposed to help you discover who you are.
From Bernice Johnson Reagon
I learned that if you bring black people together, you bring them together with a song. To this day, I don't understand how people think they can bring anybody together without a song.
When the culture is strong, you've got this consistency where black people can grow up in these places with this voice just resonating about our special-ness in the universe. And I always say you're in trouble if you get too far away from that core that grounds you.
If every moment is sacred, and If you are amazed and in awe most of the time when you find yourself breathing and not crazy, then you are in a state of constant thankfulness, worship and humility.
Well, the first time I ran into the term religion, people were asking whether you had any. You know, some people had religion and some people didn't have religion.
I went to a church where you could not sing out loud in the service until you had been saved.
And I used to think that proof that I had religion was whether I knew how to sing all of the songs.
I was at the Smithsonian for twenty years, and I'm still at the Smithsonian as a curator emeritus, and I still plan to figure out what that means for me at this point in my life.
So one of the things that happened with integration in the South is they found that the black teachers were much more educated than the white teachers.
I think the Civil Rights Movement changed that trajectory for me. The first thing I did was leave school. I was suspended for my participation in Movement demonstrations in my hometown, December, 1961.
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