Background
Virginia Foster Durr was born on August 6, 1903, in Birmingham, Alabama. She was a daughter of Dr. Sterling Foster, an Alabama Presbyterian minister, and Ann Patterson Foster.
106 Central St, Wellesley, MA 02481, USA
From 1920 to 1923, Durr attended Wellesley College in Massachusetts.
Durr with her children.
Durr with her husband, Clifford Durr
106 Central St, Wellesley, MA 02481, USA
From 1920 to 1923, Durr attended Wellesley College in Massachusetts.
https://www.amazon.com/Outside-Magic-Circle-Autobiography-Virginia/dp/0817305173/?tag=2022091-20
1985
(Virginia Foster Durr was a monumental champion for civil ...)
Virginia Foster Durr was a monumental champion for civil rights. A white southerner who returned to Alabama in 1951 after twenty years in Washington, she was horrified to revisit the racism of her childhood. She wrote hundreds of letters - humorous, sharp and observant - to her friends up north, among them Eleanor Roosevelt, Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson, Hugo Black and C. Vann Woodward. Published on the 100th anniversary of Durr's birth, her letters offer a distinctive glimpse into the day-to-day battles for racial justice at a pivotal moment in American history.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/041594516X/?tag=2022091-20
2003
Virginia Foster Durr was born on August 6, 1903, in Birmingham, Alabama. She was a daughter of Dr. Sterling Foster, an Alabama Presbyterian minister, and Ann Patterson Foster.
From 1920 to 1923, Durr attended Wellesley College in Massachusetts.
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.
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. 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.
Virginia Foster Durr was a civil rights activist whose social conscience was first stirred during the Great Depression, when she worked among unemployed people in Birmingham, Alabama. 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.
In the years since her death, Virginia Durr has been lauded as one of the earliest and most loyal champions of civil rights.
(Virginia Foster Durr was a monumental champion for civil ...)
2003A daughter of privilege, Durr spent most of her adult life supporting unpopular causes, especially civil rights. She and her husband, Clifford, were among many young white liberals and reformers who flocked to Washington, D.C., during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. After leaving Washington, they became unpopular with some whites for supporting blacks in their struggle for civil rights in Alabama.
Durr reports that as a child of the Alabama aristocracy, she shocked her elders by rebelling against the treatment of her black friends. Yet she accepted segregation and, as a sophomore at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, Durr actually refused to sit next to a black girl and was reprimanded by her housemistress.
After marrying attorney Clifford Durr and moving to Washington, D.C., in the 1930s, Durr was gradually converted to more liberal beliefs through her associations with her husband’s New Deal colleagues. As Gimbel noted in her review of Durr’s book, “Virginia’s Washington was a court of moral aristocrats listening to the music of reform.” She was deeply involved in the movement to abolish the poll tax (at this time for women, not for blacks) and began to change her racist views because of her associations with people like Eleanor Roosevelt, Mary McLeod Bethune, and her brother-in-law Hugo Black, a Supreme Court justice.
In 1948, Durr supported Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace, parting company with her fellow Democrats. Clifford also refused to support President Harry S. Truman’s loyalty oath program. In the early 1950s the Durrs returned to Montgomery, Alabama, where Clifford established a law practice and Virginia became a secretary. The Durrs became embroiled in the anti-communist hysteria surrounding the congressional hearings chaired by Senator Joseph McCarthy and Senator James O. Eastland.
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.
Virginia Foster Durr was an executive vice president of the Woman’s National Democratic Committee, Southern Conference for Human Welfare, National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax.
Virginia's upbringing was steeped in traditional white southern mores, including acceptance of racial segregation, and she was taught to behave as a "southern lady."
At the time of Virginia's death, The Atlanta Constitution described her as a true moral authority and the white matron of the Civil Rights Movement.
Quotes from others about the person
"Virginia's courage, outspokeness, and steely conviction in the earliest days of the civil rights movement helped change this nation forever." - Bill Clinton
In 1926, Virginia married Clifford Durr, an attorney. They had four daughters.
1867 - 1952
1864 - 1944
Clifford Judkins Durr (March 2, 1899 – May 12, 1975) was an Alabama lawyer who played an important role in defending activists and others accused of disloyalty during the New Deal and McCarthy eras, and who represented Rosa Parks in her challenge to the constitutionality of the ordinance requiring the segregation of passengers on buses in Montgomery that launched the 1955-56 Montgomery Bus Boycott.
1927 - 2013
1939 - 2016
February 4, 1913 – October 24, 2005
October 11, 1884 – November 7, 1962
