Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick

Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick (1933–1986) was an African-American musician, civil rights activist, and minister from Haynesville, Louisiana. In late 1964 he was a co-founder of the Deacons for Defense and Justice, an armed black self-defense group, in the small industrial mill town of Jonesboro, Louisiana, to protect the black community against white violence. Together with Earnest "Chilly Willy" Thomas, Kirkpatrick also founded Deacons chapters in other cities of Louisiana, and in Mississippi and Alabama.

An associate of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Kirkpatrick was a singer/songwriter, serving as director of folk culture.

Biography Named after the renowned 19th-century abolitionist Frederick Douglass, Kirkpatrick was born in 1933 in Haynesville, northern Louisiana. His father John L. Kirkpatrick was a minister and his mother died young. He had four sisters and a brother who survived to adulthood. They attended the local segregated schools and church, growing up steeped in gospel and spiritual music. Kirkpatrick learned to play the guitar and sing, and began to compose his own music. His parents encouraged his education and he graduated from Grambling College (now Grambling University), a historically black college, with a degree in biology. They met challenges in a different way than rural blacks in agricultural areas, demanding that CORE follow their lead.

As black workers sought civil rights in Jonesboro, they had come under intimidation and attack by members of the local Ku Klux Klan (KKK) chapter. Kirkpatrick and Thomas formed the Deacons for Defense and Justice as an armed group to protect civil rights workers, their families and the black community.

That same year, Kirkpatrick was ordained as a minister in the Church of God and Christ in Jonesboro.

Musician In 1968, soon after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Kirkpatrick recorded an album with Jimmy Collier, Everybody's Got a Right to Live, for Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. The collection of songs from the civil rights era is also available by download, cassette, or CD. He wrote and composed the songs about leading figures of black history, after learning at a 1969 performance in a Brooklyn school, that black children had few books and music that taught about the contributions of their people to the United States and the world. Kirkpatrick's ballads honor seven leaders, including Harriet Tubman, Paul Robeson, and Martin Luther King Jr., and the Deacons for Defense and Justice. Kirk and Seeger performed folk songs, children's songs, and original compositions, accompanied by Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch, and a chorus of children.

Known as Reverend Douglass Kirkpatrick, he continued to write and perform songs, accompanying himself on guitar. In 1975 he performed Ron Turner's 1972 song "The Ballad of Frank Wills" on WNYC. It was about the break-in at Watergate and ultimate resignation of President Richard M. Nixon, from the perspective of the security guard who found the first evidence. This was part of Kirkpatrick's full performance on Dave Sear's Folk and Baroque radio program, WNYC, which aired January 1, 1975. This song was used in Episode 3 of the 2022 TV miniseries White House Plumbers.

Kirkpatrick founded and hosted the Louisiana Folk Fest, to pull communities and families together and preserve their music. In 1978 the event was recorded by Smithsonian Folkways, the third recording Kirkpatrick made with them. It featured gospels and spirituals, sung by family and friends.

Later years

Kirkpatrick moved with his wife to New York City, where he served as a Baptist minister. He and his wife had had three daughters and a son together, all of whom settled in Grambling as adults.

He died August 16, 1986, at St. Luke's Hospital in New York. He was survived by "his wife, the former Annie Pearl Thompson; his father, the Rev. John L. Kirkpatrick; his stepmother, Arabella; three daughters, Cameillia Ann, Alfreda Denise and Brunella Roanna, and a son, Howard Curtis, all of Grambling; four sisters, Mary Helen Staten of Lafayette, La., Lovie Leola Stakes of Chicago, Lucille Bradford of Midland, Tex., and Mae Faye Hunter of Argo, Ill.; a brother, Robert L. Kirkpatrick of Dallas, and seven grandchildren."