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“I Take the Pictures as I See Them”: Doris Derby as Womanist, Activist and Photographer in the Civil Rights Movement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2022

EMILY BRADY Open the ORCID record for EMILY BRADY [Opens in a new window]
EMILY BRADY*
Affiliation:
Department of American and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

Doris Derby's photographic archive offers a powerful perspective on the civil rights movement that has yet to be critically or academically engaged with. Derby, an activist, photographer, and educator who has appeared in such texts as Hands on the Freedom Plow (2010) and in such collections as Julian Cox's Road to Freedom (2008), is a gateway figure to a richer, more nuanced visual history of the movement. This article utilizes original interviews, archival material, and a survey of secondary literature to call for increased consideration for Doris Derby's work. Derby's womanist perspective challenges the dominant visual rhetoric of the movement and advocates for increased consideration of the everyday activism of African American women. Men, women and children – but especially African American women – are presented in Derby's lens as dynamic agents of change. Derby's work challenges the dominant canon of the movement, which frequently relies on charismatic male leadership and black victimization. Instead, considering Derby's photography broadens our understanding of what everyday resistance in the civil rights movement was like for thousands of African Americans.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 56 , Issue 4 , October 2022 , pp. 565 - 588
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press in association with the British Association for American Studies

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References

1 Doris Derby, Poetagraphy: Artistic Reflections of a Mississippi Lifeline in Words and Images: 1963–1972 (self-published by Dr Doris Derby, 2019), 6.

2 Doris A. Derby, interview with the author, Atlanta, Georgia, Sept. 2018.

3 In recent years, Derby's work has been featured internationally: We Will Walk: Art and Resistance in the American South, Turner Contemporary in Margate, UK (Feb.–Sept. 2020); “I Am a Man”: Photographs and Struggles for Civil Rights in the South of the United States, 1960–1970, Paillon Populaire, France (Oct. 2018–Jan. 2019).

4 Danny Lyons, “Time Will Tell, Part Two,” Bleak Beauty Blog, 14 June 2008, at https://bleakbeauty.com/2008/06/14/time-will-tell-part-two (accessed 30 Aug. 2020).

5 “Dr. Doris Derby Awards,” Dashboard, at www.dashboard.us/dr-doris-derby (accessed 30 Aug. 2020).

6 These statistics were gathered by surveying six collections of civil rights movement photography: Kasher, Steven, The Civil Rights Movement: A Photographic History, 1954–1968 (New York and London: Abbeville Press Publishers, 1996)Google Scholar; Cox, Julian, Road to Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement 1956–1968 (Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 2008)Google Scholar; Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Double Exposure: Through the African American Lens (Lewes: D. Giles Ltd, 2015); Speltz, Mark, North of Dixie: Civil Rights Photography beyond the South (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2016)Google Scholar; Kelen, Leslie G., ed., This Light of Ours: Activist Photographers of the Civil Rights Movement (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011)Google Scholar; and Berger, Martin A., Freedom Now! Forgotten Photographs of the Civil Rights Struggle (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

7 Kasher; Cox; Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture; Speltz; Kelen; Berger.

8 Kasher, 12.

9 Carleton, Don, Struggle for Justice: Four Decades of Civil Rights Photography (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2020), 5Google Scholar.

10 For a further discussion of the civil rights movement “master narrative” see M. Bahati Kuumba, “Dismantling the Master's Narrative: Teaching Gender, Race, and Class in the Civil Rights Movement,” in Julie Buckner Armstrong, Susan Hult Edwards, Houston Bryan Roberson, and Rhonda Y. Williams, eds., Teaching the American Civil Rights Movement: Freedom's Bittersweet Song (New York: Routledge, 2002), 175–91.

11 Raiford, Leigh, Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

12 For works that consider the contributions of African American women to the long civil rights movement, texts include Holsaert, Faith S., Noonan, Martha P., Richardson, Judy, Robinson, Betty Garman, Young, Jean Smith, and Zellner, Dorothy, eds., Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2010)Google Scholar; Crawford, Vicki L., Rouse, Jacqueline Anne, and Woods, Barbara, eds., Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941–1965 (Brooklyn: Carlson Publishing Inc., 1990)Google Scholar.

13 The “politics of respectability” refers to the internalization of modes of acceptable behaviour, often middle-class in nature, which “equated black public behaviour to the advancement of African Americans as a group.” See Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; McGuire, Danielle L., At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance – A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Vintage Books, 2010)Google Scholar.

14 Clemons, Kristal Moore, “I've Got to Do Something for My People: Black Women Teachers of the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Schools,” Western Journal of Black Studies, 38, 3 (Fall 2014), 141–54Google Scholar.

15 See Gill, Tiffany M., Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women's Activism in the Beauty Industry (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

16 Olson, Lynne, Freedom's Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to 1970 (New York and London: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 14Google Scholar.

17 Berger, Freedom Now!, 13.

18 Ibid., 10.

19 Morgan, Edward P., “The Good, the Bad, and the Forgotten: Media Culture and Public Memory of the Civil Rights Movement,” in Romano, Renee C. and Raiford, Leigh, eds., The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory (Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 2006), 137–66, 140Google Scholar.

20 Berger, 9.

21 Ibid., 10.

22 For consideration of the intersection between activism and everyday life in photography see Wood, Sara, “‘The Thousand and One Little Actions Which Go to Make Up Life’: Civil Rights Photography and the Everyday,” American Art, 32, 3 (Fall 2018), 66–85Google Scholar.

23 Derby, interview with the author.

24 Ibid.

25 Ibid.

26 Abigail Bobrow, “Doris Derby: Activist, photographer, artist, professor,” Storied, 19 Dec. 2019, at https://storied.illinois.edu/doris-derby (accessed 30 Aug. 2020).

27 Cox, Road to Freedom, 40.

28 Derby, interview with the author.

29 Walker, Alice, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (London: Women's Press, 1984), xiiGoogle Scholar.

30 Doris A. Derby, “Sometimes in the Ground Troops, Sometimes in the Leadership,” in Holsaert et al., Hands on the Freedom Plow, 444–45.

31 Ibid., 445.

32 Collins, Patricia Hill, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2000), 204Google Scholar.

33 Derby, interview with the author.

34 Ibid.

35 Derby, “Sometimes in the Ground Troops,” 445.

36 In analysing these photographs according to both their composition and their biographical/historical context, I evoke the approach of such scholars as photographic historian Deborah Willis. See Willis, Deborah, Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840 to the Present (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2000)Google Scholar.

37 Many of Derby’s exhibitions that specifically consider women are entitled with variations on the idea of “Women Change Agents” or “Women, Agents of Change.” The exhibition at Atlanta Airport was entitled the former. See Gabbie Watts, “Airport Hosts Doris Derby's Photos of Women in Civil Rights,” WABE, 7 Feb. 2017, at www.wabe.org/airport-hosts-doris-derbys-photos-women-civil-rights (accessed 10 April 2021).

38 There are many texts in which the only reference made to Johnson is regarding her arrest and assault. See Vicki Crawford, “Beyond the Human Self: Grassroots Activists in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement,” in Vicki L. Crawford, Jacqueline Anne Rouse, and Barbara Woods, eds., Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941–1965 (New York: Carlson Publishing, 1990), 13–27.

39 McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street, 102.

40 Patricia Sullivan, “Civil Rights Activist June Johnson,” Washington Post, 18 April 2007, at www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/17/AR2007041701988.html (accessed 30 Aug. 2020).

41 Doris Derby, interview with Joseph Monier, PhD, Atlanta, GA, April 2011, at www.crmvet.org/nars/derby_d.htm#dd_womanist (accessed 30 Aug. 2020).

42 Derby, “Sometimes in the Ground Troops,” 445.

43 Ward, Brian, “Sex Machines and Prisoners of Love: Male Rhythm and Blues, Sexual Politics, and the Black Freedom Struggle,” in Ling, Peter J. and Monteith, Sharon, eds., Gender and the Civil Rights Movement (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1999), 41–69, 53Google Scholar.

44 Clarissa Myrick-Harris, “Behind the Scenes: Doris Derby, Denise Nicholas and the Free Southern Theatre,” in Crawford, Rouse, and Woods, 219–33, 221.

45 Derby, interview with the author.

46 Arielle Dreher, “Civil Rights Photographer Doris Derby Unveils Work at JSU Tonight,” Jackson Free Press, 28 Sept. 2017, at www.jacksonfreepress.com/news/2017/sep/28/civil-rights-photographer-doris-derby-unveils-work (accessed 30 Aug. 2020).

47 Examples include Road to Freedom (2008), We Will Walk (2020), and the display at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, GA.

48 “Through the Lens of Civil Rights Photographer Doris Derby: In Pictures,” The Guardian, 1 Feb. 2020, at www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2020/feb/01/civil-rights-photographer-doris-derby-we-will-walk-turner-contemporary (accessed 30 Aug. 2020).

49 Bobrow, “Doris Derby.”

50 Derby, Interview with Joseph Monier.

51 Gabrielle Schwarz, “‘We Were Documenting for History’: An Interview with Civil Rights Photographer Doris Derby,” Apollo: The International Art Magazine, 10 July 2020, at www.apollo-magazine.com/interview-civil-rights-photographer-doris-derby (accessed 30 Aug. 2020).

52 Derby, interview with the author.

53 Cox, Road to Freedom, 40.

54 Berger, Freedom Now!, 112.

55 Jimmy the Early Bird interviewing Doris Derby (Side A only), Doris Adelaide Derby Papers, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.

56 Doris Derby, “Writings – Research/Course Papers on Liberty House Co-ops (1968–1974),” Doris Adelaide Derby Papers, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.

57 The idea of food cooperatives as a counterspace has been articulated by Maurice Rafael Magaña in the context of the Oaxacan social movement since 2006, and can be extrapolated onto the context of the North Bolivar County Farm Cooperative. Maurice Rafael Magaña, “Spaces of Resistance, Everyday Activism, and Belonging: Youth Reimagining and Reconfiguring the City in Oaxaca, Mexico,” Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 22, 2 (Oct. 2016), 215–34.

58 Berger, 112.

59 Cox, 40.

60 Schwarz.

61 Ibid.

62 Bobrow, “Doris Derby”

63 Raiford, Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare, 1.

64 Derby, interview with the author.

65 Sonia Weiner, “Narrating Photography in ‘The Sweet Flypaper of Life’,” MELUS, 37, 1 (2012), 155–76, 155.

66 Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, Volume II, 1941–1967: I Dream a World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 244.

67 Derby, Poetagraphy, 10.

68 Derby, interview with the author.

69 Derby, Poetagraphy, 40–41.

70 “National Committee for Rural Schools Conference, New York City, 1962,” sound recording, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, 1993, transcribed 12 Sept. 2018 by the author.

71 Tim Lewis, “Civil Rights Era Photographer Doris Derby: ‘If People Were Being So Brave, It Was the Least I Could Do,’ The Guardian, 1 Feb. 2020, at www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/feb/01/doris-derby-photographs-black-lives-mississippi-delta-civil-rights-era (accessed 31 Aug. 2020).

72 Derby, “Sometimes in the Ground Troops,” 443.

73 “Interview Transcript: George King and Worth Long,” Will the Circle Be Unbroken Program File and Sound Recordings, Box 7, Doris Adelaide Derby Papers, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University, 18.

74 Derby, “Sometimes in the Ground Troops,” 442–43.

75 Doug Peterson, “Visualizing the Civil Rights Movement,” 24 Oct. 2016, Illinois College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, https://las.illinois.edu/news/2016-10-24/visualizing-civil-rights-movement (accessed 31 Aug. 2020).