As often happens with the deaths of notable African Americans, we get the news days and sometimes weeks after they leave. This is the case with Doris A. Derby, an activist photographer who was seemingly everywhere during the civil rights movement. She joined Grandparents on March 28 in Atlanta and was 82 years old.
Her vital statistics, born November 11, 1939, in the Bronx, are but a small indication of her commitment to freedom and justice, her membership of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and her role as founder of the Southern Free Theatre. She grew up in the Williamsbridge section of the Bronx and even as an elementary school student she expressed concern about inequality and the underrepresentation of black culture in the classroom.
Studying dance was an early dream, and she was reasonably successful in winning a scholarship to Catherine Dunham's African dance lessons at the Harlem YMCA. But a lifelong pursuit with civil rights took over as a teenager after she joined the NAACP youth branch and her church. Besides participating in rallies and demonstrations, Doris was a student at Hunter College where she majored for the first time in cultural anthropology.
During her final year of university, she started traveling abroad and visiting countries like Nigeria, France and Italy. Back home, her daring passion for wanderlust took her to Native American territories, particularly to the Navajo Indian Reservation where she saw firsthand the oppressive conditions the people suffered there. These trips and experiences fueled her determination to make change and took that vision and energy into the classroom and adult literacy programs sponsored by SNCC at Togaloo College in Mississippi. In this capacity she worked closely with John O'Neill and Gilbert Moses as co-founder of
Southern Free Theatre. Around the same time period, she began actively photographing the movement's activities, with a particular interest in documenting the role her comrades played in combating racism and discrimination.
From 1963 to 1972 she was a field secretary for the SNCC in Mississippi, where she worked alongside Bob Moses, COFO (Council of Federal Organizations), and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), where she often accompanied the indomitable Fanny Lou Hammer. Doris was an indispensable worker in nearly every freedom-promoting organization during her days in Mississippi, including the Child Development Group, the Head Start Program, and the massive Freedom Summer initiative under Bob Moses.
During all of these activities, her camera was busy capturing the decisive moments in the conflict, and she soon became a member of Southern Media, Inc. And I started traveling across the state collecting photos and moments that would be part of various documentaries. Some of these images were part of her lectures and exhibitions where she taught and trained students to become active in the movement.
In her book "Poetagraphy: Artistic Reflections of Mississippi Lifeline in Words and Images: 1963-1972" which she published independently in 2019, a good sample of her artistic and political work is presented. Two of her photos were published in "Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Account of Women in SNCC," and she also contributed an article recounting some of the trials and tribulations she faced during that time. Her photographs and exhibits are too numerous to list here, and the same can be said of her academic career which intensified after she left Mississippi in 1972 and focused on completing her master's and doctoral degrees. in Social Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Doris joined the Georgia State University System in 1990 as an associate professor of anthropology and founding director of the Office of African American Student Services and Programs. In keeping with her preoccupation with the visual arts and photography, she was the co-founder of the Board of Performance and Visual Arts at Georgia State University in 2008. After more than 22 years in college, she retired, although she continued to lecture and work as a consultant.
During her time at Georgia State University, she lived in Atlanta with her husband, actor Bob Banks, both of whom are active members of countless foundations and community groups. On October 6, 2011, Doris received the 26th Governor's Prize in the Humanities in Atlanta for documenting and archiving photographs and stories to enable current and future generations to learn about the civil rights movement and social change in the Deep South.
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