Doris A. 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.
Doris Derby’s parents met in New York and married in the mid-1930s. 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). 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.
