My fellow Americans: Four score and five years ago, in the great state of Alabama, on the sacred soil of “The Cotton State,” in the heart of Dixie, the state that is still among the preeminent producers of the fleecy white blooms that clothe mankind with such unparalleled comfort and fitness, but a state that's an outstanding provider of peanuts, too, being second only to Georgia in output of the versatile legume, and a leader in timber products, textiles, and bituminous coal…Alabama, home of the original capital of the Confederacy, scene of the great Indian wars of Andrew Jackson and of the great naval battle of Mobile, birthplace of illustrious Americans—Hugo Black, Truman Capote, Bill Connor, and Governor Kissin’ Jim Folsom not to speak of other raunchy inhabitants of the Governor's Mansion such as George Wallace and his wife, Cornelia, known privately behind poor George's back as the Montgomery Man Eater…Alabama, home of other celebrities like the great nineteenth-century slavery enthusiast W. L. Yancey and the internationally acclaimed poetess of the same period, the seventy-seven-pound Mabel Vanlandingham Potts, known as the Little Song Sparrow of the Tombigbee…My fellow Americans, it was eighty-five years ago in Alabama's greatest metropolis, the great city of Birmingham, the Pittsburgh of the South, world-ranking producer of steel and pig iron, major consumer of coal and supplier of coke—in the old-fashioned sense of the word—to the world, thriving railroad center, being the hub of the L.&N., the G.M.&O., the A.C.K., the S.A.L., the S.L. & S.F., the C. of G. and the Southern…Birmingham—chief operating center for the Southern region of both J. C. Penney and Burger King, city of verdant peaks and mountain vistas, home of higher institutions of learning such as Birmingham-Southern University, proudly and affectionately known as the Southern Rutgers…Fellow Democrats, beloved brothers and caring Americans, it was in the great city of Birmingham in the great state of Alabama in the golden year of 1903 that there first saw the Iight of day the great lady whose nomination for President of the United States I proudly second this evening, Virginia Foster Durr!
Virginia Durr was the granddaughter of a slave owner, born to comfort and privilege, with all the advantages accruing to a young white maiden of her class. Such a young woman might have been expected to succumb to all the easy shibboleths of her time and place—to become a snob and a suburban dilettante, a frequenter of high-society galas and country-club blowouts, to fall into the indolent pose of the trifler, the parlor reactionary, and kitchen racist. This type is endemic in the South, as fixed in legend as Scarlett O'Hara. You see them everywhere in Dixie, from Fredericksburg, Virginia, to Fredericksburg, Texas. Married or unmarried, they have chaste bodies and even chaste minds, unsullied by so much as a flyspeck of rational cognition. They have believed in the preservation of social and racial purity, the preservation of the maidenhead, and the preservation of the human spirit against all invasion by Beauty and Truth. They have besmirched God's glorious footstool—and the beautiful Southland—by their vain and silly hypocrisy. They have glorified the vice of flibbertigibbety.
But, my fellow Americans, what a splendid thing it was when Virginia Durr—almost uniquely among her contemporaries—broke out of this constricting mold which would have so bound her to the conventional pieties. Almost single-handedly and with great bravery, during a period of hatred and reaction, she demonstrated that a Southern belle—and a beautiful one at that—need not obey those rules that dictated that a young girl be blind to poverty and ignorance, to racial inequality and the savagery of vested power. She showed that the flower of Southern womanhood need not be symbolized by a pale and damp camellia, languishing in hothouse desuetude, but by a triumphant rose vigorously ablush with moral courage and ready to put forth wrathful thorns in the pursuit of decency and justice. My friends and fellow Americans, the noble example of Virginia Durr, her intense probity and the passionate zeal she has displayed in her lifelong quest for liberty and a fair shake for all of God's creatures here on earth—this example supremely qualifies her for the highest office in the land, and I therefore proudly and humbly second her nomination for President of the United States of America!
[Delivered at a celebration of Virginia Durr's eighty-fifth birthday, August 6, 1988, Vineyard Haven. Previously unpublished.]