NY Times: “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-based 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 Bronx-born Dr. 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.””