On today’s show, we prepare ourselves for the 4th of July holiday by spending time with archival recordings from Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick, who was a musician, civil rights activist, and minister from Haynesville, Louisiana. In late 1964 he became 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. But in addition to his powerful political work, Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick was an incredible musician, and in that role, he became the Director of Folk Culture for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He used music to teach American and African-American history, and in 1976 he came to San Francisco, where he gave the talk we’re featuring in this program, interspersed with singing Black spirituals and folk music, exploring the roots and more modern manifestations of the relationship between political movement and Black music.
Our Resistance in Residence Artist this week is rapper and member of Oakland hip hop crew Living Legends, creator and curator of West Oakland’s now-gone Spirithaus Gallery, and multi-media visual artist, Josh Whitaker, also known as Bicasso.
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