Doris Derby

Doris Adelaide Derby (November 11, 1939 – March 28, 2022) was an American activist and documentary photographer. She was the adjunct associate professor of anthropology at Georgia State University and the founding director of their Office of African-American Student Services and Programs. She was active in the Mississippi civil rights movement, and her work discusses the themes of race and African-American identity. She was a working member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and co-founder of the Free Southern Theater. Her photography has been exhibited internationally. Two of her photographs were published in Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC, to which she also contributed an essay about her experiences in the Mississippi civil rights movement.

Early life Doris Derby's parents met in New York and married in the mid-1930s. Born on November 11, 1939,

She began to formally study dance while in elementary school and gravitated towards African-centered dance traditions. Derby received a scholarship to study at the Katherine Dunham African dance classes at the Harlem YMCA. At the college, she was a member of the Christian Human Relations Group where they discussed topics such as segregation, sit-ins, and the Freedom Riders. who contributed in developing literacy materials to help prepare black people to pass the required, yet discriminatory literacy test for voter eligibility in Mississippi. As a SNCC organizer in Jackson, Mississippi, Derby felt compelled to work in the South as she saw a need for change through her life experiences.

Her experience moving to the South as a native northerner sparked and ignited her. A war on the home front had been started. For this reason, people from all walks of life, backgrounds and ethnic groups were called to work together for a greater cause. Many individuals participated and were committed to the movement, however, black people were most impacted by the injustice of the South and took this time to really take a stance. Derby felt that a repertory theater company could travel throughout the state and incorporate all of the arts through the development of a cultural format. Creating a space for interaction with the people in the movement and the grassroots community who had suffered the most. The theater would be a vehicle that could be used to inform and perhaps reveal new creative strategies to deal with the institution of segregation. "We needed to look into ourselves in order to empower ourselves and reclaim the freedom we did not have in Mississippi and other southern states." Derby was also involved in the marketing, public relations, and training of these groups.

In 1967 she joined Southern Media, Inc., a documentary, photography, an filmmaking group in Jackson, Mississippi, that traveled throughout the state documenting the lives, struggles, initiatives and gains of people in and around the movement.

Photography

Derby's father taught her to use a camera. After her arrival in Mississippi in 1963, she began to document the everyday human effort required to live through dramatic events and protests of the civil rights struggle. "Documenting was one of the things I was destined to do from an early age", she later explained. "I knew that we did not have our history in history books and I knew we had a lot of achievements. I wanted to make sure that I recorded whatever i could, whatever was historical and happening around me".

Derby's work can be found in the following: Polly Greenberg's The Devil Has Slippery Shoes, 1990; Clarissa Myrick-Harris's Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearer, 1941-1965, 1993; Deborah Willis' Reflections in Black - A History of Black Photographers, 2000;

In 2020, Derby's work was included in an exhibition of civil rights art at the Turner Contemporary in London. We Will Walk: Art and Resistance in the American South included sculptural assemblages, paintings and quilts by more than 20 African American artists from Alabama and surrounding states. In 2021, a collection of her images from the south, with transcripts of conversations with her collaborator Hannah Collins, was published as A Civil Rights Journey.

Derby's work was included in the 2025 exhibition Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985 at the National Gallery of Art.

Personal life Derby lived in Atlanta, Georgia, with her husband, actor Bob Banks, whom she married in 1995. She adopted his children, Daniel and Lisa. The three survived her, along with two grandchildren, Dr. Ashley Gilmore, Ms. Alexis Carr, two great-grandchildren, and her sister Pauline.

They were active leaders in their community and members of local and national organizations. She died on March 28, 2022, in Atlanta from cancer at the age of 82. She was also interviewed on WSB-TV, Channel 2 Atlanta, for a segment shown on the anniversary, as well as a commemorative special program that was aired the day before. In addition, Derby was featured in a documentary film about past and current March on Washington participants. This film was sponsored by the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, with the interview being conducted by Atlanta-based film interns. In April 2010, Derby and other SNCC members gathered to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of SNCC. Derby is one of the 52 contributors to the book Hands on the Freedom Plow - Personal Accounts of 52 Women in SNCC. On October 6, 2011, Derby received the 26th Governor's Award in the Humanities in Atlanta for documenting and preserving images and stories enabling current and future generations to learn about the civil rights movement and social change in the Deep South.