Bernice Johnson Reagon, civil rights activist, singer, composer, and scholar, died on Tuesday (July 16) at the age of 81.

Bernice served as a founding member of The Freedom Singers established by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in the early 1960s. The organization’s Legacy Project chairman Courtland Cox confirmed the news of her passing Wednesday (July 17) night. 

Her daughter Toshi Reagon also shared the tragic news in a Facebook post. “Details regarding a public celebration of life forthcoming,” she wrote. No cause of death has been revealed. 

The southwest Georgia native also founded Sweet Honey in the Rock in 1973, before she retired from the group in 2004. Sweet Honey in the Rock was a three-time Grammy Award-nominated group that expressed their history as black women through song, dance, and sign language. 

Bernice was the daughter of a Baptist minister and attended Albany State University to study music. Over time, she became an important figure in the civil rights movement when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested in 1962. "I was already in jail, so I missed most of that," she said during an interview about the songs she sang as an activist on Fresh Air in 1988. "But what they began to write about... no matter what the article said, they talked about singing."