Doris A. Derby

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 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.”