Doris Derby

Her grandmother, Edith Delaney Johnson, had started a chapter of the NAACP in Maine in the 1920s.

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.

Derby's association with the civil rights movement began when she joined the NAACP Youth Chapter in her hometown of New York City at her church at the age of 16.

She continued her association with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) while attending Hunter College in New York.

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.

As a student activist, she was on the front lines of the civil rights movement.

Derby worked primarily with SNCC in New York, Albany, Georgia, and throughout the state of Mississippi.

Doris Derby's parents met in New York and married in the mid-1930s.

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.

Born on November 11, 1939, Derby was raised in Williamsbridge, the outskirts of the Bronx.

During her time in a predominantly white elementary school, she started to notice a lack of black representation in her textbooks, movies, advertisements, and in the arts.

For this reason, in her early age, she was motivated to make a change.

In this she was encouraged by her parents, Hubert Derby, an engineer and later civil servant who had to change jobs several times because of discrimination, and Lucille (nee Johnson).

Derby was approaching her last year in college in 1960 when she visited countries such as Nigeria, France, and Italy.

During her time she began appreciating the differences in cultures and learning about the struggles the countries were facing.

She visited the Navajo Indian Reservation where she saw the economic inequalities the population was experiencing.

In 1963, before the March on Washington, Derby, an elementary school teacher at the time, was recruited to work in an adult literacy program initiated by the SNCC at Tougaloo College located in Mississippi.

During this time, Derby recalled rooming with Sandra "Casey" Hayden and Hellen Jean O'Neal-McCray 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 made many contributions during her time at Tougaloo College with John O'Neal, another SNCC worker on the literacy project as well as Gilbert Moses, a journalist for the Jackson Free Press.

Most notably, she co-founded the Free Southern Theater (FST), 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 saw a need for the creation of a cultural artistic tool that could be used to involve, inspire, enlighten, and galvanize black people to critically think and create for themselves.

The theater provided the opportunity for black people to creatively take on issues within the context of the civil rights movement, segregation and closed society of violent Mississippi.

Furthermore, it sparked social change, social justice, equal opportunity and citizenship regardless of race.

From 1963 to 1972 Derby served as a SNCC field secretary in various capacities in Jackson, Mississippi, in the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), the Poor Peoples' Corporation (PPC), and the Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM) Head start Program.

During this period she worked on preparations for the Freedom Summer, taught in various educational enrichment programs, and promoted local arts and culture.

She also helped incorporate Liberty House Cooperative Marketing, an arm of the PPC.