Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick
 The Ballad of a Watergate Security Guard, 2:32, sung by Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick, WNYC
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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. Beginning in 1968, he recorded three albums with Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. One was a recording of the 1978 Louisiana Folk Fest, an annual event which Kirkpatrick had conceived and regularly hosted, to preserve and celebrate musical culture. He used music to teach African-American history, including the Civil Rights Movement, to schoolchildren. Later in life he settled in New York City.
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.
Kirkpatrick became a member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which formed in the 1950s to work for civil rights of African Americans by gathering together the power of their churches. He ultimately served as director of folk culture for the SCLC. He continued to sing, play the guitar and write his own music. Among his best-known songs was his version of Pete Seeger's "Everybody's Got a Right to Live", described as "an anthem of the civil rights movement."
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