“Lord, I got a right to the tree of life,” sang Bernice Johnson Reagon, whose speech capped the Women’s Week 1995 celebration Friday night in the Great Hall of the Memorial Union.

Reagon, a distinguished professor from American University and founder and artistic director of the 1960s musical group Sweet Honey, sang the gospel hymn to open her speech, “From Harriet and Sojourner to Carrie Chapman Catt and Fannie Lou Hamer: Right to the Tree of Life.”

Reagon said people must try to understand the meaning of the words in the phrase.

The “right” is the power and capacity to act or produce, but “right” in our society means the power of privilege by nature or tradition, Reagon said.

Reagon asked the audience to imagine a country which would restrict people from the right to speak in the forum of voting and then to imagine the United States as that country.

America is a country which has restricted groups of people from voting and shut them out from speaking, she said.

What is it about people that makes them have more rights to power than others? Reagon asked. “Nothing should mean anything about power, except for what people arrange for themselves,” she added.

People should make known their beliefs and everyone should do their part and pass on something to others, Reagon said. “The best way to find out if you really know something is to try to teach it to someone else.”

Reagon described her experience at the recent conference for women’s rights in Beijing, China. She said she heard stories of women who may lose their jobs because women may no longer be able to hold office in some Islamic countries.

“Military coups are trying to roll back and erase everything women have accomplished, and they are doing it all in the name of Allah,” Reagon said.

Reagon also encouraged everyone to vote, because if people don’t vote, then they are “electing people with silence,” she said.

“I don’t understand why people who have a chance to speak loudly, speak loudly with silence. If we speak loudly with our silence, look who gets elected.”

By not speaking, or speaking with silence, people are giving their power to speak to someone else who is speaking clearly, Reagon said.

Reagon said women need to unite in the struggle for equality and power.

This is not an issue of fighting to liberate from men, but a better chance for women to act as human beings and to be treated as human beings, Reagon said.

“You can kill a person, but you can’t kill an idea,” she said.