Doris Derby

Doris Derby
Nationality	American
Known for	Activist, Photographer

Doris Derby is an activist, documentary photographer and retired adjunct associate professor of anthropology at the Georgia State University. She was active in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, and her work discusses the themes of race and identity of African-Americans. She was a working member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (S.N.C.C.), as well as co-founder of the Free Southern Theater, and the founding director of the Office of African-American Student Services and Programs (O.A.A.S.S.P.). Her photography has been exhibited throughout the United States. Two of her photographs are 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. Derby lives in Atlanta, Georgia with her husband, actor Bob Banks. They are active leaders in their community and members of local and national organizations.

Dr. Doris 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 and continued with her association with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) while attending Hunter College in New York. She was on the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement as a student activist. Derby worked primarily with SNCC in New York, Albany, GA, and throughout the state of Mississippi.

In 1963, before the March on Washington, Dr. Derby, an elementary school teacher, was recruited to work in an adult literacy program SNCC initiated at Tougaloo College in Tougaloo, Mississippi to help develop literacy materials programmed to prepare black people to pass the required discriminatory literacy test for voter eligibility in Mississippi and as a S.N.C.C. organizer in Jackson, Mississippi. She felt compelled to work in the South because:

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