Virginia Heard Durr

http://www.awhf.org/durr.htm

Virginia Foster was born in Birmingham in 1903 to Dr. Sterling and Ann Patterson Foster. After two years at Wellesley College, she began to question and challenge her world. She returned to Alabama where she met and married Clifford J. Durr, a young attorney whose family was from Montgomery, Alabama. Durr became a nationally known figure and recognized as a defender of justice, social equality and civil rights.

As a young wife and mother in Depression-era Birmingham, Durr became active in the Junior League and volunteered for the Red Cross. While working with the Red Cross, she became aware that dairies poured their milk into the gutters when it could not be sold. She proposed a project for the Junior League to have the dairies donate the milk to the Red Cross to be distributed to the poor.

When the Durrs moved to Washington D.C. for Clifford to take a position in the Roosevelt New Deal administration, Virginia worked with the Democratic National Committee women's section and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt campaigning to abolish the poll tax. As a founding member of the Southern Conference on Human Welfare, she served as the vice-chairman of the Civil Rights Committee, a subcommittee to abolish the poll tax. Eventually, the committee split from the Southern Conference in 1941 and became the National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax. She continued for years to work for women's rights, civil rights, labor issues and to abolish the poll tax.

While working to improve labor conditions and on other labor issues, Durr worked with individuals who later became labeled "communists" or "socialists." She was called before Senator James Eastland's subcommittee investigating possible communist activities. Rather than name anyone as a communist or socialist, she refused to respond to the committee's questions. She was encouraged by more than one family member and friend to stop associating with various people and organizations and there were many times when the Durrs were ostracized from what was termed in her autobiography as the "Magic Circle," the social elite of Alabama.

The Durr's interest and belief in social equality continued to develop and grow especially as they personally witnessed social injustice. With the Brown Decision and the integration of Montgomery public schools, their home became a "safe place" for African-American student Arlam Carr and other African-American students that attended Sidney Lanier High School. Both Clifford and Virginia became well known white southern supporters of the Civil Rights Movement with the Rosa Parks arrest in Montgomery in 1955. On the evening of Parks arrest, E.D. Nixon and the Durrs went to the Montgomery jail to obtain Parks' release. Their involvement continued throughout the court case and the bus boycott.

Virginia Foster Durr died on February 24, 1999. At the time of her death, The Atlanta Constitution described her as a true moral authority and the white matron of the Civil Rights Movement. President Bill Clinton commented at her passing: "Her courage, outspokeness, and steely conviction in the earliest days of the civil rights movement helped change this nation forever."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Foster_Durr

Virginia Foster Durr (August 6, 1903 – February 24, 1999) was an American and a white civil rights activist and lobbyist. She was married to lawyer Clifford Durr, who shared her ideals, was close friends with Rosa Parks and Eleanor Roosevelt, and was sister-in-law (through her sister's marriage) to and good friends with Supreme Court Chief Justice Hugo Black who sat on many crucial civil rights cases. She was inducted into the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame in 2006. http://www.awhf.org/durr.htm

Early life to New Deal

She was raised in Birmingham, Alabama and attended Wellesley College in Massachusetts until she had to leave during her junior year due to financial difficulties. Durr has explicitly acknowledged Wellesely as the catalyst of her moral transformation from a racist to civil rights activist when the head-of-house at her Wellesley Dorm challenged Durr's racist beliefs by forcing Durr to dine with a negro girl. A Virginia Durr Moment occurs when one's environment furnishes the individual with a challenging experience that can lead to moral growth and development. After returning to Birmingham, she met her future husband, the attorney and Rhodes Scholar Clifford Durr.

In 1933 she moved with her husband to Washington, D.C., where they became New Dealers. While her husband was working for the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, Durr joined the Woman’s National Democratic Club. In 1938, she was one of the founding members of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW), an interracial group aimed at lessening segregation in the Southern United States. Working together with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, she lobbied for legislation to abolish the poll tax.

Progressive Party candidate

Quote from an obituary written by Patricia Sullivan,

"Mrs. Durr ran for the U.S. Senate from Virginia on the Progressive ticket in 1948. At that time she said, "I believe in equal rights for all citizens and I believe the tax money that is now going for war and armaments and the militarization of our country could be better used to give everyone in the United States a secure standard of living."

Her opponents were Democrat Absalom Willis Robertson, Republican Robert H. Woods, Independent Howard Carwile & Socialist Clarke T. Robbe.

Return to Montgomery

In 1951 she returned with her husband to Montgomery, Alabama, where she became acquainted with local civil rights activists. A group of people in her town arranged to have integrated church meetings of black and white women. There was a lot of opposition against the integrated meetings, from the locals as well as from within the church. In her autobiography, Mrs. Durr wrote how the head of the United Church Women in the South (UCWS, an integration group) came to one of the meetings. Opponents to the meeting took the license plate numbers from the cars and published them in an Alabama Ku Klux Klan magazine. The women of the UCWS received harassing phone calls. Some had family members who publicly distanced themselves from their activities, because it was bad for business. As a result, the women became too afraid to continue their meetings. In December 1955, Virginia and her husband, along with E.D. Nixon, bailed Rosa Parks out of jail after she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat for a white person.

Virginia Foster Durr was a supporter of the sit-in movement and Freedom Rides. Virginia and her husband offered sleeping space to students coming from the North to protest. Her husband, with whom she had five children, died in 1975. Mrs. Durr remained active in state and local politics until she was in her nineties. In 1985 she published her autobiography, "Outside the Magic Circle." She continued being politically active until a few years before her death on February 24, 1999 at the age of 95. Upon hearing of Durr's death, Rosa Parks said Durr's "upbringing of privilege did not prohibit her from wanting equality for all people. She was a lady and a scholar, and I will miss her."

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Over the course of her long life, Virginia Foster Durr (1903-1999) was a constant presence in Alabama politics and the movement for civil rights. Her life spanned most of the twentieth century, and Virginia Durr had a front-row seat for the New Deal, McCarthyism, and the civil rights movement. She spent years working to abolish the poll tax and to end segregation, and her husband, Clifford, an attorney, was involved with a number of civil rights cases.

Virginia was born on August 6, 1903, in Birmingham, Jefferson County, to the family of Sterling Foster, a prominent Presbyterian minister, and Anne Patterson Foster. Her upbringing was steeped in traditional white southern mores, including acceptance of racial segregation, and she was taught to behave as a "southern lady." Although her family was not wealthy, Virginia was sent to finishing school in New York, where she followed a rigorous academic program and was trained in the social graces. As a sophomore at Wellesley College, Durr came to question segregation after her experience in the college's dining hall with "rotating tables," the school's policy of requiring students to eat meals with random groups of students, including African Americans. Durr initially protested this policy but was told that she could either accept it or leave the college; she chose to accept it.

Because of financial difficulties, Durr was forced to leave college during her junior year and return to Birmingham, where she met attorney Clifford Durr at church. Virginia had already rejected several suitors, and her family had begun to worry that she would never marry. After a brief courtship, she and Clifford married in April 1926. In 1933, the Durrs moved to Washington, D.C., after her husband accepted a position with the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, an agency founded by the Hoover administration to try to shore up the economy in the early years of the Great Depression. He was later appointed to the Federal Communications Commission by Franklin Roosevelt. It was during their time in Washington and through her husband's New Deal contacts that Virginia Durr's activism began. She joined the Woman's National Democratic Club and began a long involvement in the campaign to abolish the poll tax, which effectively denied most southern African Americans and poor whites the right to vote.

In 1938, while still living in Washington, Durr became one of the founding members of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare. Formed in part as a response to Franklin Roosevelt's proclamation that the South was the leading economic problem in the nation, the SCHW was a biracial coalition formed in Birmingham in 1938 to challenge racial segregation and improve living and working conditions in the South. It was as democratic an organization as could be found in the South of the 1930s, drawing support from professors and journalists as well as mine workers and sharecroppers. The organization was spearheaded by a wide array of southern liberals, including Lillian Smith, Jim Dombrowski of the Highlander Folk School, and Supreme Court justice Hugo Black, who was also Durr's brother-in-law. Eleanor Roosevelt was also present for the inaugural meeting in Birmingham, where she caused a minor controversy by refusing to sit in segregated seating. Durr was drawn to the SCHW primarily because of her interest in ending the poll tax, but she was also attracted to the group's work with labor unions and its stance on civil rights. In 1941, Durr became vice president of the SCHW's civil rights subcommittee, along with Texas representative Maury Maverick, who served as president. Although the SCHW was continually criticized by the conservative press because of its civil rights work and its alleged Communist ties, Durr later recalled her work with the organization as one of the happiest events of her life.

In 1941, the SCHW's civil rights committee became the National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax, with Durr as its vice-chair. Like the SCHW, the NCAPT was continually attacked for its reputed Communist associations. The organization did, on occasion, receive financial support from various Communist-backed organizations, and Joseph Gelders, a Birmingham native and public Communist, was very active in both groups. As a whole, however, the red-baiting tactics of the group's critics appear to be largely unfounded. The NCAPT accepted support from anyone who opposed the poll tax and made no distinctions based on political affiliations. Nevertheless, the Durrs would continue to be plagued by rumors that she was a Communist.

Because the Durrs did not publicly denounce Communism or join in the fierce red-baiting of the postwar years, they were often targeted by anti-Communist activists. In 1954, Durr was called to New Orleans to testify before Senator James Eastland's Internal Security Committee, an agency similar to the House Un-American Activities Committee in its objective of investigating alleged Communists. The hearings in New Orleans came on the eve of the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka ruling, which was expected to strike down segregation in public education. Scholars have suggested that Durr was targeted because Eastland wanted to strike back at Hugo Black, who had joined in the unanimous Supreme Court decision in favor of Brown. She was brought before the committee ostensibly because of her work with the Southern Educational Fund, an allegedly "subversive" organization. Durr gave her name, stated that she was not a Communist, and then refused to answer further questions, standing in silent defiance of the committee as she was questioned, occasionally taking out a compact and powdering her nose. The stress of the hearings caused Clifford Durr to suffer a nervous collapse.

By the early 1950s, the Durrs were again living in Alabama, having moved to Montgomery in time to witness the civil rights movement. Given their long-standing commitment to ending segregation, it was perhaps inevitable that both the Durrs would become intimately involved in the struggle. Through their work for civil rights, the Durrs were acquainted with E. D. Nixon, who was head of the Montgomery branch of the Pullman Porters Union as well as president of the local NAACP chapter; Rosa Parks, who occasionally worked as a seamstress for the Durrs; and Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King. During Durr's work with the SCHW, James Dombrowski had introduced her to the Highlander Folk School, of which he was a co-founder. Highlander was a settlement house in rural Tennessee that taught passive resistance techniques. She was immediately taken with the institution because of its work with miners and with labor unions. Because of her earlier association with Highlander, Virginia Durr was able to secure a scholarship for Rosa Parks to attend the school for two weeks in 1954. When Parks was arrested in 1955 for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus to a white man, Clifford Durr and E. D. Nixon bailed her out of jail. The Durrs continued their work for civil rights once the boycott was underway, with Clifford Durr advising civil rights attorney Fred Gray on the cases that challenged segregated transportation.

For most of the 1960s, the Durr household was a hub of civil rights activity, as the Durrs opened their home to journalists, activists, historians, and attorneys who were drawn to Montgomery during the Freedom Rides or the Selma to Montgomery March. The Durrs were well-known in Montgomery, and their liberal politics and support for civil rights activists did not always endear them to their fellow white Alabamians. Frequently harassed and threatened, the Durrs eventually sent the two youngest of their five children to boarding schools outside the South after they were ostracized by teachers and classmates. Virginia's experiences during the civil rights movement convinced her that poverty was the greatest problem afflicting the United States, and much of her later work grew out of that conviction.

Clifford Durr died in 1975. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Virginia Durr continued to write and speak on behalf of progressive political causes. In 1985, she published her autobiography, Outside the Magic Circle, which was widely praised. She was active in state and local politics well into her early nineties, often protesting nuclear weapons and working to achieve economic equality. Durr died on February 24, 1999, at the age of 95. In the years since her death, Virginia Durr has been lauded as one the of the earliest and most loyal champions of civil rights. In 2003, much of her civil rights era correspondence was published by Patricia Sullivan as Freedom Writer: Virginia Foster Durr, Letters from the Civil Rights Years.