The Free Southern Theater (FST) was a community theater group founded in 1963 at Tougaloo College in Madison County, Mississippi, by Gilbert Moses, Denise Nicholas, Doris Derby, and John O’Neal. The company manager was Mary Lovelace, later Chair of the Art Department at U.C. Berkeley. The company disbanded in 1980. The founders sought to introduce free theater to the South, both as a voice for social protest, and to emphasize positive aspects of African-American culture. O’Neal, Derby, and Moses outlined the philosophy of the troupe in a founding document: