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"In fact when Sweet Honey was ten years old it was too big for me to run, and I knew it, but I ran it for another thirteen years because I couldn't convince other people to really do it. And this year, I'm not running it."
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"The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over."

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"Many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices."

"I think the moral majority and religious right have been shrinking and having not quite as loud a voice in America, and all of a sudden people are coming to their own realizations going, 'Joe down the street is gay and he's a great guy.'"
Explore more quotes by Bernice Johnson Reagon


"The voice I have now, I got the first time I sang in a movement meeting, after I got out of jail... and I'd never heard it before in my life."


"The Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife, actually, was an effort to put something on the mall in Washington so American tourists could walk through America, and in their minds everything on the mall would be American."


"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."


"I went to a church where you could not sing out loud in the service until you had been saved."


"The first job I had with the Smithsonian was as a field researcher among African American communities in Southwest Louisiana and Arkansas for the festival."


"But I'm a historian. I wasn't interested in just being a producer, I was interested in doing research and presenting that research to a general public."


"Most people come out of their Ph.D. experience trying to prove themselves, trying to get ahead, trying to get published. You're scared everybody else is going to do your research and get your topic."


"And I used to think that proof that I had religion was whether I knew how to sing all of the songs."


"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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