Doris Derby

Dr. Doris Adelaide Derby is an American activist, documentary photographer, and retired Director of Georgia State University’s Office of African American Student Services and Programs and adjunct associate professor of anthropology. 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), as well as co-founder of the Free Southern Theater, and the founding director of the Office of African-American Student Services and Programs. 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.[2] Derby lives in Atlanta, Georgia with her husband, actor Bob Banks.[3] They are active leaders in their community and members of local and national organizations.

Doris Derby
Derby in 2014
Born1939 (age 81–82)
The Bronx, New York City[1]
NationalityAmerican
OccupationActivist, Photographer, Educator
Known forCivil Rights Photography
Spouse(s)Bob Banks

Early life

Doris Derby's parents met in New York and married in the mid-1930s. Born in 1939, Derby was raised in Williamsbridge, the outskirts of the Bronx.[2] 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.[2]

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.[2]

Derby’s association with the Civil Rights Movement began when she joined the NAACP Youth Chapter in her hometown of New York City at the age of sixteen.[4] She continued her association with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) while attending Hunter College in New York.[5] 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.[5]

Civil rights and cultural activism in Mississippi

In 1963, before the March on Washington, Dr. 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[6] who contributed in developing literacy materials to help prepare black people to pass the required, yet discriminatory literacy test for voter eligibility in Mississippi.[7][8] 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 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.[7]

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),[9] 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."[7]

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. [7]

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.[5] She also helped incorporate Liberty House Cooperative Marketing, an arm of the PPC.[10] 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.[5] She lectured and exhibited at Jackson State College on African art and culture.

Her many "trials and tribulations" in the SNCC and FST in Mississippi are reflected in her independently published book Poetagraphy: Artistic Reflections of a Mississippi Lifeline in Words and Images: 1963 - 1972 (2019).

Further education and achievements

Derby left Mississippi in 1972 and focused on African and African-American Studies, for which she earned an M.A., as well as a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.[3] In 1990, she joined the University System of Georgia at Georgia State University (G.S.U.) as an Adjunct Associate Professor of Anthropology and the Founding Director of the Office of African-American Student Services and Programs (O.A.A.S.S.P.). Her department's achievements included the retention and graduation of a vast number of African-American students, as well as the enhancement of cultural and educational ties between African, Caribbean, Latin and African-American students and the community at large. She also co-founded the Performing and Visual Arts Council (P.V.A.C.) at Georgia State University in 2008.[7] At the end of 2012, Derby retired from Georgia State University after 22 years of service.[5] Derby also taught at the College of Charleston, the University of Illinois, and the University of Wisconsin.[11]

Photography
Derby at the Through a Lens Darkly premiere at the 2014 Atlanta Film Festival

Derby has exhibited her photographs both locally and nationally. Her photographs have been shown at the Smithsonian Institution, the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Illinois, the Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York,[5] and the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles,[12] California. Derby's photographs have also been exhibited in Atlanta, Georgia, at the High Museum,[12] the Hammonds House Museum, Spelman College, the Fulton County Southwest Arts Center, and the Auburn Avenue Research Library.[5] As well, her photographs have been exhibited at the Art, Design and Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara, the Jackson State University and Margaret Walker Alexander Center Art Galleries and the George & Leah McKenna Museum of African American Art in New Orleans. Other exhibits displayed in Atlanta were at Georgia State University, in the Gallery Lounge and The Ernest G. Welch Gallery.[5] In 2009, her work was part of an exhibit, "Road to Freedom," at the High Museum in Atlanta, which explored the role of photography in the Civil Rights Movement.[13]

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;[12] Deborah Willis' Reflections in Black - A History of Black Photographers, 2000;[12] The Nation’s Longest Struggle - Looking Back on the Modern Civil Rights Movement, D.C. Everest Oral History Project, 2013. Her many "trials and tribulations" in the literacy and theater projects are reflected in her self-published book Poetagraphy: Artistic Reflections of a Mississippi Lifeline in Words and Images: 1963 - 1972.[14]

As February 7, 2020 Derby's work is included in an exhibition of civil rights art at the Turner Contemporary in London. The exhibition brings such works to the UK for the first time and includes sculptural assemblages, paintings and quilts by more than 20 African American artists from Alabama and surrounding states.[15]

Acknowledgements

For the 50th Anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington, Derby was interviewed for a perspective documentary film about past and current March on Washington participants, along with 16 others who participated, for Time magazine's five-part documentary "March Special - One Man, One March, One Dream."[16] She was also interviewed on W.S.B.-TV, Channel 2 Atlanta, for a segment shown on the anniversary, as well as a commemorative special program that was aired the day before.[17] 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.[18] 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.[19]

References
  1. Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC. Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press. 2010. p. 436. ISBN 978-0-252-03557-9.
  2. Holsaert, Faith S., Martha Prescod Norman Noonan, Judy Richardson, Betty Garman Robinson, Jean Smith Young, and Dorothy M. Zellner (2010). Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC (1st ed.). Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. pp. 271, 436. 437, 438. ISBN 9780252035579.
  3. "Doris Adelaide Derby Oral History". Library of Congress. LOC. Retrieved 5 June 2015.
  4. Peterson, Doug (2016-10-24). "Visualizing the civil rights movement". College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at Illinois. Retrieved 2019-03-30.
  5. "African American Studies". African American Studies. Mississippi State University. Retrieved 6 June 2015.
  6. Doris Derby (2019). Introduction.Poetagraphy: Artistic Reflections of a Mississippi Lifeline in Words and Images: 1963 - 1972. Independently published (February 3, 2019). ISBN 1795786884
  7. "Talkin Revolution with Dr. Doris Derby". alternateroots.org. Alternate Roots. 5 February 2014. Retrieved 6 June 2015.
  8. Adelaide., Derby, Doris (2008-06-09). "Doris Adelaide Derby papers, 1960-1992". findingaids.library.emory.edu. Retrieved 2018-10-23.
  9. Productions, Junebug (2015-03-05), Interview with Dr. Doris Derby, co-founder of the Free Southern Theater, retrieved 2019-03-30
  10. "Doris Derby - SNCC Digital Gateway". SNCC Digital Gateway. Retrieved 2018-10-23.
  11. "Derby Bio in Atlanta Public Archives" (PDF).
  12. "Doris Derby: Bibliography & Exhibitions". aavad.com. aavad. Retrieved 7 June 2015.
  13. "We Shall Overcome," American History. Jun2008, Vol. 43 Issue 2, p52-59.
  14. Derby (2019)
  15. "We Will Walk – Art and Resistance in the American South".
  16. "One Dream – Memories from the March on Washington". TIME.com. Retrieved 2018-10-23.
  17. EndPlay. "P2P Dr. Doris Derby Tour Part 1". WSBTV. Retrieved 2019-03-30.
  18. Hands on the freedom plow : personal accounts by women in SNCC. Holsaert, Faith S. Urbana. 30 September 2010. ISBN 9780252098871. OCLC 964447087.CS1 maint: others (link)
  19. "Doris Derby People on the Move". bizjournals.com. American City Business Journals. Retrieved 5 June 2015.
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