She was the adjunct associate professor of anthropology at Georgia State University and the founding director of their Office of African-American Student Services and Programs.

Two of her photographs were published 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.

[2] During her time in a predominantly white elementary school, she started to notice a lack of black representation in her textbooks, movies, advertisements, and in the arts.

[2] In this she was encouraged by her parents, Hubert Derby, an engineer and later civil servant who had to change jobs several times because of discrimination, and Lucille (nee Johnson).

[2] Derby's association with the civil rights movement began when she joined the NAACP Youth Chapter in her hometown of New York City at her church at the age of 16.

In 1963, before the March on Washington, Derby, an elementary school teacher at the time, was recruited to work in an adult literacy program initiated by the SNCC at Tougaloo College located in Mississippi.

[9][10] As a SNCC organizer in Jackson, Mississippi, Derby felt compelled to work in the South as she saw a need for change through her life experiences.

[9] Derby made many contributions during her time at Tougaloo College with John O'Neal, another SNCC worker on the literacy project as well as Gilbert Moses, a journalist for the Jackson Free Press.

"[9] Derby saw a need for the creation of a cultural artistic tool that could be used to involve, inspire, enlighten, and galvanize black people to critically think and create for themselves.

The theater provided the opportunity for black people to creatively take on issues within the context of the civil rights movement, segregation and closed society of violent Mississippi.

During this period she worked on preparations for the Freedom Summer, taught in various educational enrichment programs, and promoted local arts and culture.

In 1967 she joined Southern Media, Inc., a documentary, photography, an filmmaking group in Jackson, Mississippi, that traveled throughout the state documenting the lives, struggles, initiatives and gains of people in and around the movement.

After her arrival in Mississippi in 1963, she began to document the everyday human effort required to live through dramatic events and protests of the civil rights struggle.

[7] In 2009, her work was part of an exhibit, "Road to Freedom", at the High Museum in Atlanta, which explored the role of photography in the civil rights movement.

[15] Derby's work can be found in the following: Polly Greenberg's The Devil Has Slippery Shoes, 1990; Clarissa Myrick-Harris's Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearer, 1941-1965, 1993;[14] Deborah Willis' Reflections in Black - A History of Black Photographers, 2000;[14] The Nation's Longest Struggle - Looking Back on the Modern Civil Rights Movement, D.C. Everest Oral History Project, 2013.

[21] On October 6, 2011, Derby received the 26th Governor's Award in the Humanities in Atlanta for documenting and preserving images and stories enabling current and future generations to learn about the civil rights movement and social change in the Deep South.