Singer, Civil Rights Activist Found Slain In Apartment

Cordell Hull Reagon, whose powerful tenor voice spread the message of the civil rights movement throughout the United States and Canada in the 1960s as a member of the Freedom Singers of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, was found dead on Nov. 12 in his apartment in Berkeley, Calif. He was 53.

The Berkeley police said Reagon was a homicide victim.

Reagon was 16 in 1959 when he emerged as a leader of the civil rights movement in Albany, Ga. James Forman, who became the executive secretary of SNCC, called him “the baby of the movement.”

Reagon, who was arrested more than 30 times in the South for his anti-segregation activities, conducted non-violent training workshops for hundreds of volunteers who journeyed to the South to work on voter registration campaigns and other civil rights projects.

In 1962, he became a founder of the Freedom Singers, usually a quartet of two men and two women who sang gospel-style freedom songs to rouse support for the civil rights movement. The quartet included his first wife, Bernice Johnson.

In the late 1960s and early ‘70s, Reagon became active in the movements against the Vietnam War, nuclear weapons and environmental destruction.

For a time he lived in New York City and worked as an organizer for the Social Service Employees Union, a youth worker for Mobilization for Youth and a career and vocational counselor.

In 1988 he moved to Berkeley, where he founded the environmental group Urban Habitat and Urban Justice Organization.