Celebrity
Bernice Johnson Reagon, Whose Powerful Voice Helped Propel The Civil Rights Movement, Has Died
Nashville, Tennessee – Bernice Johnson Reagon, a musician and scholar who utilised her rich, powerful contralto voice to support the American Civil Rights Movement and global human rights campaigns, died on July 16, according to her daughter’s social media post. She was 81.
Reagon was best known as the founder of Sweet Honey in the Rock, an internationally recognized African American female cappella group that she managed from 1973 until her retirement in 2004. The Grammy-nominated group’s purpose has been to educate, empower, and entertain. They sing songs from various genres, including spirituals, children’s music, blues, and jazz. Some of their original compositions pay tribute to American civil rights leaders and foreign liberation movements, such as the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.
Bernice Johnson Reagon, Whose Powerful Voice Helped Propel The Civil Rights Movement, Has Died
“She was incredible,” said Tammy Kernodle, a prominent professor of music at Miami University with a focus on African American music. She referred to Reagon as someone “whose divine energy, intellect, and talent all intersect in such a way to initiate change in the atmosphere.”
According to an obituary posted on social media by her daughter, musician Toshi Reagon, Reagon’s musical activism began in the early 1960s when she worked as a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and became an initial member of the Freedom Singers. In 2010, the trio reassembled and was joined by Toshi Reagon to play for then-President Barack Obama in a White House performance series televised nationally on public television.
Reagon was born in 1942 in Dougherty County, Georgia, outside of Albany. In the early 1960s, he attended music workshops at Tennessee’s Highlander Folk School, an activist training ground. At an anniversary celebration in 2007, Reagon explained how the institution helped her recognize her musical history as unique.
“From the time I was born, we were always singing,” Reagon told me. “When you’re in a culture and, quote, ‘doing what comes naturally to you,’ you don’t notice it. I believe my work as a cultural scholar, singer, and composer would have been very different if someone had not drawn my attention to the people who need songs to stay alive, to keep themselves together, or to boost the energy in a movement.”
Reagon was arrested and dismissed from Albany State College after participating in a civil rights march. She eventually graduated from Spellman College. While a graduate student of history at Howard University and the vocal director of the D.C. Black Repertory Company, she founded Sweet Honey in the Rock.
In 1965, Reagon recorded her debut solo album, “Folk Songs: The South,” for Folkways Records. She joined Atlanta’s Harambee Singers as a founding member in 1966.
According to the Smithsonian, Reagon began working with the institution in 1969 when she was asked to organize and manage a 1970 festival program called Black Music Through the Languages of the New World. She went on to curate the African Diaspora Program and establish and lead the Program in Black American Culture at the National Museum of American History, where she ultimately became curator emeritus. She produced and played on many Smithsonian Folkways recordings.
Reagon was a distinguished professor of history at American University in Washington for a decade, commencing in 1993 and ending as a professor emerita.
According to Kernodle, we think that music has always been a component of civil rights activity, but it was people like Reagon who made music “part of the strategy of nonviolent resistance.” They brought those songs and practices from within the church to the streets and jail cells. And they popularised such songs.”
Bernice Johnson Reagon, Whose Powerful Voice Helped Propel The Civil Rights Movement, Has Died
“What she also did that was very important was that she historicised how that music functioned in the civil rights movement,” according to Kernodle. “Her dissertation was one of the first real studies of civil rights music.”
Reagon won two George F. Peabody Awards, including one for her role as lead scholar, conceptual producer, and host of the Smithsonian Institution and National Public Radio series “Wade in the Water: African American Sacred Music Traditions.”
She has received the Charles E. Frankel Prize and Presidential Medal for distinguished contributions to public awareness of the humanities, a MacArthur Fellows Program award, and the Martin Luther King Jr. Centre for Nonviolent Social Change’s Trumpet of Conscience Award.
SOURCE | AP
Retired Philadelphia Eagles center Jason Kelce destroyed a Penn State football fan’s phone after the alleged heckler called his brother, Travis Kelce, a fag.
In now-viral footage published on X (previously Twitter) on Saturday, Nov. 2, the retired Philadelphia Eagles great was seen accompanied by football fans outside Beaver Stadium in State College, Pa., for the Penn State-Ohio State game.
As the individual capturing the tape lifted a fist to Jason, 36, and called his name for a fist bump, another man nearby hurled the homophobic slur at the retired Philadelphia Eagles star.
Hey, Kelce. How does it feel that your brother is a queer dating Taylor Swift?” the man questioned, referring to Travis, 34, who has been seeing Swift since 2023. Jason turned around seconds later, snatched the man’s phone, and crushed it to the ground.
“Looked like a Penn State student was getting in Kelce’s face for no reason,” the original X user who submitted the video remarked. “Wild scene in State College.”
“Kelce how does it feel that your brother is a f****t for dating Taylor Swift?”
Jason Kelce proceeded to slam this kids phone on the ground.
Looked like a Penn State student was getting in Kelce’s face for no reason. Wild scene in State College pic.twitter.com/3PEdZXWhSg
— Chives (@jarrett_daveler) November 2, 2024
Additional footage on X shows Jason smashing the phone on asphalt before picking it up and walking away. The phone’s owner, wearing a Penn State hoodie at the time of the incident, was shown in many videos strolling closely behind Jason and recording him before the conflict occurred.
Another footage published on X, which appears to have been filmed after Jason shattered the man’s phone, showed the hooded Penn State supporter trudging through a mob to pick up his phone off the ground.
“Give me my phone, bro,” he seemed to say to Jason.
The NFL alum seized the gadget first, then stood in front of the man and asked, “Who’s the fag now?” Others appeared to interfere.
The incident occurred while Jason was at Beaver Stadium for an appearance on ESPN’s College GameDay. The Ohio State Buckeyes won Saturday’s game 20-13 over the Penn State Nittany Lions.
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Shaun White, the Olympic snowboarding champion, already has an impressive medal tally, but his surprise proposal to Nina Dobrev deserves a gold medal.
On Wednesday, the couple announced their engagement on Instagram. Dobrev posted photographs of the two hugging under an arch of white roses and showing off her five-carat Lorraine Schwartz engagement ring.
“RIP boyfriend, hello fiancé,” Dobrev said in the caption.
However, the photographs only tell half the tale, as Shaun devised an elaborate plan to surprise Dobrev with his proposal.
Shaun White’s Proposal To Nina Dobrev Was Romantic Gold
According to a Vogue interview published Wednesday, Shaun said he assembled a team of people from the couple’s inner circle and Vogue personnel to trick Dobrev into thinking she had been invited to an intimate dinner party with Anna Wintour.
Dobrev accepted the invitation, joking that Shaun made it “look so legitimate.”
He even asked Dobrev’s stylist to outfit her in Chanel for the event.
Dobrev said she recognized what was happening when she entered the venue and saw White standing beneath the flowery arch.
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Shaun’s Proposal To Nina Dobrev Was Romantic Gold
“I went into shock,” Dobrev admitted, later adding that White “said all the right things” before she agreed.
According to the publication, after Shaun proposed, the couple partied into the early morning hours with close friends and relatives.
“Best night of my life,” Shaun captioned his Instagram story on Wednesday.
The duo first became romantically involved in 2020, and they have since publicly recorded their relationship, globe vacations, and White’s Olympic farewell on social media.
SOURCE | CNN
Hollywood actress Teri Garr, known for her roles in classics like “Young Frankenstein” and “Tootsie,” has passed away at 79. She died Tuesday of multiple sclerosis “surrounded by family and friends,” said publicist Heidi Schaeffer.
Admirers took to social media in her honor, with writer-director Paul Feig calling her “truly one of my comedy heroes. I couldn’t have loved her more” and screenwriter Cinco Paul saying: “Never the star, but always shining. She made everything she was in better.”
Throughout her career, the performer, often known as Terri, Terry, or Terry Ann, seemed destined for show business from a young age.
Her father was Eddie Garr, a well-known vaudeville comic, and her mother was Phyllis Lind, one of the original high-kicking Rockettes at New York’s Radio City Music Hall. Their daughter began dancing classes at six and was performing with the San Francisco and Los Angeles ballet companies by age fourteen.
She was 16 years old when she joined the road crew of “West Side Story” in Los Angeles, and she began starring in small roles in films as early as 1963.
In an interview from 1988, she described how she landed the role in “West Side Story.” After being rejected at her initial audition, she returned the following day dressed differently and was accepted.
Teri Garr, a comedian
Teri Garr then found steady work as a movie dancer, appearing in the chorus of nine Elvis Presley films, including “Viva Las Vegas,” “Roustabout,” and “Clambake.”
She has also appeared on various television shows, including “Star Trek,” “Dr. Kildare,” and “Batman,” and was a featured dancer on the rock ‘n’ roll music show “Shindig,” the rock concert performance “T.A.M.I.,” and a cast member of “The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour.”
Her breakthrough role was as Gene Hackman’s girlfriend in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 thriller The Conversation. This led to an interview with Mel Brooks, who offered her the Gene Wilder’s German lab assistant role in Young Frankenstein if she could speak with a German accent.
“Cher had this German woman, Renata, making wigs, so I got the accent from her,” Garr once said.
The film established her as a great comic performer, with New Yorker film writer Pauline Kael calling her “the funniest neurotic dizzy dame on screen.”
Her big smile and off-center appeal helped her land roles in “Oh, God!” with George Burns and John Denver, “Mr. Mom” (as Michael Keaton’s wife), and “Tootsie,” in which she played the girlfriend who loses Dustin Hoffman to Jessica Lange and discovers he has dressed up as a woman to revive his career.
A gift for spontaneous humor
Teri Garr, best known for comedy, has shown in films such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Black Stallion, and The Escape Artist that she can also tackle drama.
She had a gift for spontaneous humor, frequently playing David Letterman’s foil during early guest appearances on N.B.C.’s “Late Night With David Letterman”.
Her appearances grew so frequent, and the pair’s good-natured bickering so convincing that rumors of romantic involvement circulated for a while. Years later, Letterman acknowledged those early appearances with helping the program become a success.
During those years, Garr began to experience “a little beeping or ticking” in her right leg. It started in 1983 and expanded to her right arm, but she thought she could handle it. By 1999, her symptoms had gotten so bad that she saw a doctor and was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.
After disclosing her diagnosis, Garr became a spokesman for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, giving hilarious remarks at events in the United States and Canada.
Source: AP
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