Cordell Reagon

Who was Cordell Reagon?

Cordell Hull Reagon was an American singer. He was the founding member of the Freedom Singers of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and a leader of the Albany Movement during the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. Reagon was born in Nashville, Tennessee, and was named for Cordell Hull, the Secretary of State under President Franklin D. Roosevelt from 1933 to 1944. His powerful tenor voice spread the message of the civil rights movement throughout the United States and Canada in the 1960s.

Cordell Reagon was just 16 in 1959 when he emerged as a leader of the civil rights movement in Albany, Georgia. James Forman, who became the executive secretary of SNCC, called him "the baby of the movement." Reagon, who was arrested more than thirty times in the South for his anti-segregation activities, conducted nonviolent training workshops for hundreds of volunteers who journeyed to the South to work on voter registration campaigns and other civil rights projects.

In 1962, at the encouragement of friend Pete Seeger, Reagon founded The Freedom Singers, a quartet of two men and two women who sang gospel-style freedom songs to rouse support for the civil rights movement.