Virginia Durr (left) and Rosa Parks in 1981 at Mount Holyoke College, where they received honorary doctorate degrees.
CREDIT: Birmingham, Alabama, Public Library Archives, Portrait Collection
IN 1954, at the height of the Red Scare, Virginia F. Durr was forced to appear at a Senate hearing in New Orleans called by Senator James Eastland, a Mississippi segregationist. He wanted to expose “Communist influence” in the emerging civil rights movement, particularly in the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, an interracial group that had waged a campaign against the poll tax. Eastland believed that everyone in the civil rights movement was a Communist. The hearings came on the eve of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, which outlawed segregation in public education, and Eastland was using Durr to discredit her brother-in-law, liberal US Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, who had joined in the unanimous Brown decision.
Durr refused to answer Eastland’s questions. At one point the fifty-one-year-old southern belle defiantly began to powder her nose. The frustrated Eastland finally ordered her off the stand. Reporters surrounded her, asking her what had impelled her to challenge the powerful senator. “Oh, I think that man is as common as pig tracks,” Durr explained. “I guess I’m just an old-fashioned Southern snob.” Newsweek and newspapers published photographs of Durr’s nose-powdering rebellion. To liberals and progressives, Durr’s combative stance was an act of courage and conscience. Most white southerners, however, viewed her as a traitor to her race and class.
Virginia Foster Durr could not have been a more unlikely candidate to become a staunch civil rights activist. She was born in a parsonage in Birmingham, Alabama, where her father, Sterling Foster, was the minister. One grandfather owned a plantation and slaves, and the other had been a Ku Klux Klan member. In her autobiography Outside the Magic Circle, she confessed that she had once believed the Klan was “something noble and grand and patriotic that saved the white women of the South.”
Although strong-willed even as a child, Virginia Foster seemed destined to be a well-brought-up southern lady. Her family were among the “genteel poor,” who looked down on those whites who were “common.” As for African Americans, she would later wonder how southerners could simultaneously hold two such conflicting images in their minds: one of the kindly servants who lovingly tended children, and another of the violent beast intent on raping white women.
The first time her values were directly challenged came in 1921, soon after she arrived at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. When she went to the dining room, she found she had been assigned to a table with an African American student. Horrified, she refused to sit there and returned to her room. The dorm housemother found her and calmly gave her the choice of sitting in her assigned seat or withdrawing from Wellesley. She took the seat. After two years at Wellesley, her family could no longer afford tuition (“The boll weevil ate my education,” she later explained), and she returned to Alabama. There she fell in love with Birmingham lawyer Clifford Durr, whose family also had deep roots in Alabama. They were married in 1926.
In the early 1930s Virginia Durr grew aware of the economic troubles outside her door. Factories were closing, and “dairies were pouring milk into the gutters because they couldn’t sell it.” Through the Birmingham Junior League, she organized a project to distribute milk to low-income children. She drove Red Cross workers into the countryside so they could certify families for relief. She met coal miners whose bodies had been destroyed by black lung and tuberculosis. On weekends she took Cliff out to poor areas and showed him children suffering from hunger.
She was troubled that those thrown out of work blamed themselves for their plight. “They never said, ‘We are destitute because U.S. Steel [a major Birmingham employer] doesn’t treat us as well as they treat the mules,’” she wrote.
In 1933, at a meeting at his prominent law firm, Cliff suggested that the partners take a pay cut rather than fire some of their employees—including a stenographer with a young child and no husband—in the midst of hard times. Logan Martin, the senior partner, got angry at Cliff, a junior partner, for even suggesting the idea. That night, Cliff explained the situation to Virginia, who suggested he resign in protest. The next day, he did.
Fortunately, Cliff quickly found a job with the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, a New Deal agency. In 1941 Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed him to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). There he challenged the growing power and concentration of broadcasters, many of whom opposed FDR’s New Deal, and pushed to set aside radio frequencies for educational programs run by nonprofit organizations (an idea that some identified as leftist and led to his investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee and the FBI).
The Durrs moved to Alexandria, Virginia, where Virginia enthusiastically joined in the social and political life of New Deal Washington. She attended parties where Pete Seeger sang folk songs and afternoon teas where Eleanor Roosevelt dropped by. John L. Lewis and his wife became her friends, as did a young New Deal bureaucrat from Texas named Lyndon B. Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird Johnson. Virginia was greatly influenced by civil rights activists Mary McLeod Bethune and Mary Church Terrell, among the first well-educated African Americans she had ever met.
In 1938 Virginia was a founding member of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, which held its first meeting in Birmingham. Some 1,500 people came, “black and white, labor union people and New Dealers,” Durr recalled. “Southern meetings always include a lot of preaching and praying and hymn singing, and this meeting was no exception. The whole meeting was full of love and hope. It was thrilling.” There she met Myles Horton from the Highlander Folk School; Aubrey Williams, director of the New Deal’s National Youth Administration; and other activists, both black and white, with whom she would wind up working for the next few decades.
Like almost all other white southerners, Durr came from a long line of loyal Democrats. So she shocked many friends and family members when she not only supported Henry Wallace’s 1948 Progressive Party presidential campaign but also ran for the US Senate on the party’s ticket in Virginia. She and Wallace garnered few votes.
During the McCarthy era, right-wingers would use her involvement with the Progressive Party, along with her work against the poll tax—she was vice chair of the National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax—as evidence of her communist sympathies.
In 1948, while Virginia was running for Senate, Cliff resigned from the FCC rather than have to administer the anticommunist “loyalty oaths” that President Harry S. Truman now required of government servants. The Durrs then moved to Denver, where Cliff worked as a lawyer for an insurance company. But after Virginia signed a petition against the Korean War, the Denver Post ran a story headlined, “Wife of General Counsel of Farmers Union Insurance Corporation Signs Red Petition,” and Cliff lost his job.
In 1952 the Durrs moved back to Alabama, settling in Montgomery. Cliff set up a law practice and Virginia became his secretary. She worked for him for thirteen years, “but he protested every day. He said that I wasn’t a proper secretary because I was too interested in the cases.”
In Montgomery, Virginia joined the local Council on Human Relations, Montgomery’s only interracial political organization, and its offshoot, United Church Women. None of this helped Cliff’s law practice. The more they were identified as white supporters of black civil rights, the fewer white clients came through his door. Most of his clients were poor African Americans, many of whom could not afford to pay for his services. The Durrs just managed to eke out a living, often with financial help from northern friends.
Through her political work Durr met the leaders of Montgomery’s black community, including Rosa Parks and E. D. Nixon, both longtime activists with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. During the summer of 1955 Myles Horton wrote Virginia, asking her to suggest a black person to attend a Highlander Folk School workshop about implementing the recent Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education decision. Virginia went to Parks’s house to ask if she would like to go. When Parks—who worked as a seamstress at the department store and occasionally sewed for the Durrs—explained that she did not have the money for bus fare to the Tennessee school, Virginia raised it. In December, a few months after returning from the workshop, Parks’s refusal to move toward the back of a segregated bus triggered Montgomery’s year-long bus boycott. After Parks was arrested, E. D. Nixon called Cliff to help bail her out of jail.
The Durrs remained involved in civil rights activism despite being shunned by most whites and facing tough financial circumstances. Virginia lent support during the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and the 1961 Freedom Rides and became “the unofficial den mother for young movement activists,” according to Dorothy Zellner, an organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, who visited the Durrs many times at their home. “While the majority of Alabamans considered Virginia and Clifford Durr traitors, not heroes,” explained Rosellen Brown, another young civil rights activist, “they represented to many of us the best of the white South, its native strength: they were sensible, outspoken, committed and only accidentally heroic.”
Reflecting on her background as a southern belle trained to admire the Confederacy and the Klan, Durr wrote, “I’ve often thought how strange it was that those who actually did try to overthrow the government by force and violence became great honored figures in the South, whereas we, their grandchildren, were reviled because we were trying to get the vote. The South is a peculiar place.”