San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Photographer documented Black life in South
DORIS DERBY 1939-2022
“I had a quest to show our culture in total, not just a little bit, or negative stereotypes.”
Doris Derby in 2011
Doris Derby, an educator, artist, activist and civil rights era photographer who turned her camera away from the violence of the times to capture the quieter moments of the movement, and in so doing documented the transformation of Black life in rural Mississippi, died on March 28 in Atlanta. She was 82.
Her death, at a hospice facility, resulted from complications of cancer, said Charmaine Minnifield, an Atlanta artist and friend.
It was the searing images of children blasted by fire hoses, of peaceful protesters set upon by snarling dogs and policemen, batons aloft, that drew the Bronxborn Derby — newly graduated from Hunter College in Manhattan after studying cultural anthropology — to Jackson, Miss., in the fall of 1963. When she began to take photos, however, her subject matter was different.
“I had a quest to show what the average person was doing,” she told the Southern Oral History Program in 2011, part of a collaboration with the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture. “I had a quest to show our culture in total, not just a little bit, or negative stereotypes.”
It took some time before she picked up a camera, however. Over five years, she was an indefatigable foot soldier of the civil rights movement, working first as a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to develop an adult literacy program.
Derby went on to co-found a repertory theater; research the educational outcomes of Black and white students; seed and oversee Head Start programs; and lead the development of cooperatives to make leather goods, Black rag dolls, baskets and other local products.
As the marketer for Liberty House, the retail outlet for those wares, she took the products on the road, traveling all over the country (she even had a booth at Woodstock). In 1968, she joined a Jackson-based initiative called Southern Media, which had a mission to document Black life and train local Black residents in photography and provide equipment and a darkroom to do so.
She photographed toddlers being examined at health care clinics, and the young doctors and nurses who were attending to them; she showed older women sewing at quilting cooperatives, or gathered at co-op committee meetings; she snapped voters off all ages casting their ballots at a local polling place; and she captured a scene in a math class that was part of an adult education program. She photographed Black-owned businesses and Black elected officials and the rapt faces of audiences at political rallies in Black churches.
In hundreds of images, Derby captured Black people engaged in the kind of civic life that had long been denied them in the American South. And her photos presented a detailed history of the civil rights movement’s grassroots efforts to empower Black people in all areas — economically, politically, socially and physically.
Derby was one of the few women behind the camera — much of the movement was chronicled by white male photographers — and she often trained her eye on women and children.
“By photographing women and children, she restored a sense of normalcy to the drama of the moment,” said Deb Willis, a professor of photography at New York University and the director of the school’s Center for Black Visual Culture/Institute for African American Affairs. “She showed images of the people who were affected by the inadequacies of that time — the inability to vote, to be educated, to have health care.”
Doris Adelaide Derby was born on Nov. 11, 1939. Her father, Hubert Allen Derby, was a civil servant shut out of work as a civil engineer because of his race, despite his degree from the University of Pennsylvania; her mother, Lucille Theresa ( Johnson) Derby was a homemaker and teacher’s aide.
Doris grew up in Williamsbridge, a neighborhood in the North Bronx that was almost rural at the time. The family kept chickens and ducks, grew vegetables and cultivated fruit trees. Her father supplemented his income making cabinetry; Doris learned woodworking from him, and sewing from her mother, all of which served her well in Mississippi years later, when she oversaw the crafting cooperatives for Liberty House.
She graduated from Hunter College in 1962 (and was inducted into its hall of fame in 2013). She earned her masters in anthropology at the University of Illinois Chicago in 1975, and her doctorate there in 1980. Derby taught anthropology and African American studies at that institution, as well as at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the College of Charleston, in South Carolina. From 1990 until her retirement in 2012 or so, she was the director of the Office of African American Student Services and Programs at Georgia State University. She was an early member of Sistagraphy, a Black women’s photography collective in Atlanta.
She married Robert A. Banks, an actor and voice-over artist, in 1995. They were both salsa enthusiasts. Her husband survives her, as does a sister, Pauline Roland Scott.