Making strides

Anew book (A Civil Rights Journey) celebrates the work of Doris Derby, known for – among other things – her images which documented the civil rights movement in Mississippi during the 1960s and ’70s. As somebody actively involved and present herself, her photographs are at once more ordinary, more intimate, more relatable and arguably therefore more powerful than those captured by other contemporaries.

Not only a photographer and civil rights campaigner, Doris has had a long and multifaceted career. A working member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), she also co-founded the Free Southern Theater. Later, she was the director of Georgia State University’s Office of African American Student Services and Programs and was also an adjunct associate professor of anthropology.

Doris has a long-standing familial connection to the civil rights movement. Her grandmother was a founding member of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), while her father was a civil rights activist who was forced out of his career in engineering due to bigotry. He died shortly