A Southern Belle Who Battled Racism

Like all good Southern girls, Virginia Foster Durr spent the first 22 years of her life looking for a husband. Unlike most Southern girls, she spent the next 60 working for equal rights.

Actually, Durr would probably demur and correct that latter figure to 50 years. “You can’t be self-righteous about it,” Durr said. “I was just as racist as anyone until I was 30 years old and went to Washington.”

That was in 1933, the very early days of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Durr’s lawyer husband, Clifford, had been appointed to the Federal Communications Commission. Her brother-in-law, Hugo Black, was serving on the Supreme Court. Durr seized the opportunity and the ambiance of Washington to plunge into political and civil rights activities that would fill an entire autobiography, “Outside the Magic Circle,” published by the University of Alabama Press.

‘Going With the Wind’

“There were three ways for a well-brought-up young Southern white woman to go,” Studs Terkel writes in the introduction.

“She could be the actress, playing out the stereotype of the Southern belle. Gracious to ‘the colored help,’ flirtatious to her powerful father-in-law and offering a sweet, winning smile to the world. In short, going with the wind.

“If she had a spark of independence or worse, creativity, she could go crazy--on the dark, shadowy street traveled by more than one stunning Southern belle.

“Or she could be the rebel. She could step outside the magic circle, abandon privilege and challenge this way of life. Ostracism, bruises of all sorts and defamation would be her lot. Her reward would be a truly examined life. And a world she would otherwise never have known.”

Writes Terkel: “It is the third road Virginia Durr traveled.”

Last week, Durr left her home in Montgomery, Ala., to be honored at a party in the library of New York University attended by a blue-ribbon list of much of liberal New York. With her silver hair swept into an ornate twist, wearing a long black velvet suit with a white ruffled blouse and carrying a dainty tapestry handbag to house the cigarettes she still occasionally indulges in, the 82-year-old Durr was warmly embraced by Bobby Kennedy Jr. and his wife, Emily. Carlos and Sylvia Fuentes shook her hand. Rose and Bill Styron hugged her. Mike Wallace greeted her admiringly. At one point she was seated, flanked by columnist Art Buchwald and cartoonist Jules Feiffer.

For a moment, anyway, it was living disproof of Durr’s lament that “There’s no left left.”

Halfway through the evening, Buchwald narrated “This Is Your Life, Virginia Durr” with vignettes from her remarkable experiences. Arriving in Washington 50 years ago, Durr immediately immersed herself in an ultimately successful battle against the poll tax. She worked early and long in the civil rights movement: In fact it was she and Clifford Durr who bailed Rosa Parks out of jail in 1955 when the Montgomery seamstress was arrested for refusing to move to the back of the bus.

Extracted a Mirror

As a gesture of support for Progressive Party presidential candidate Henry Wallace, Durr ran for the Senate. “It was ridiculous,” she said. “I ran because nobody would mention his name. We decided to run local candidates so we could get his name in the paper.”

Accused by Sen. James O. Eastland, the Democratic senator from Mississippi who died last week, of “trying to overthrow the government by force and violence,” Durr refused to answer his questions when she was summoned before his committee in Washington. Instead, Durr extracted a mirror from her handbag and calmly--in a picture that ran on front pages around the country--proceeded to powder her nose.

“I told him I stood in total contempt of his committee,” Durr said. “I was determined that I would not answer any of his questions. . . .

“It was like Alice in Wonderland,” Durr said. “They said I would go to the White House and Mrs. Roosevelt would slip me things she’d got from the President, and then I would slip them to a Communist spy ring.”

Threatened with jail for refusing to answer Eastland’s questions, Durr called on her old friend, Lyndon B. Johnson, then a senator from Texas. “Well, I’d known him for years,” Durr said. Lady Bird Johnson’s family came originally from Alabama, and she and Durr had become close friends in Washington.

“So I called Lyndon. Lady Bird answered the phone and said Lyndon was in bed. And I said, ‘Well you go in and wake him up.’ She did. I told him that we were all being threatened to be put in jail by Jim Eastland. And he never said anything, he didn’t go on record. All we know is we didn’t get put in jail, and Jim Eastland swore he was going to put us all in jail. The whole thing was just like a Kafka episode. It nearly ruined my husband’s law practice.”

One day before Durr came to New York for the festivities honoring her and her book, Eastland died at age 81. “Well I don’t believe in speaking ill of the dead,” Durr said, “but you can hardly expect me to mourn him, can you?”

Durr’s youthful background hardly prepared her for this life of ladylike rebellion. Born to Alabama aristocracy in 1902, Durr was educated at all the proper schools: first Miss Finch’s, later at Wellesley. She made her debut, married (albeit at the geriatric age of 22) and was vice president of the Junior League.

Bored as a Belle

But the truth, Durr said, is that “I was really no great Southern belle. I tried to be, but I was never quite successful. Unfortunately, I often got bored.”

At Wellesley, the young Virginia Foster found herself seated in the dining room with a fellow student who was black. “It was a first time that I had ever eaten with a black person,” Durr said. “But that didn’t change my life. It was an episode that began to make me think more.”

What Durr realized was that “I wasn’t afraid of black people, it was my father I was afraid of. He was a black-belt racist.” Durr was afraid her father would learn she was fraternizing with blacks and would haul her out of what was obviously a den of Yankee iniquity.

Instead, Durr finished college and headed back to Montgomery, and a whirlwind Prohibition-era social life.

Durr, of course, was intent on finding a husband. “That was the only thing Southern girls could do, was to marry well,” Durr said. Luckily, she met Clifford Durr one day at church. Clifford Durr, a Rhodes scholar, promptly proposed marriage. “Why we fell in love is one of life’s great mysteries,” Virginia Durr said. “I certainly was lucky.” In any case, “I had achieved my goal. I was married.”

It was Washington that truly changed Durr’s life. Suddenly she was working for the Democratic Party, surrounded by women who did not devote their entire lives to tea parties. Like her friend Eleanor Roosevelt, Durr championed causes. “I think the children (she had three daughters and a son) and my husband both wished I would be making cakes and cookies instead of sitting on the telephone,” she said.

From the mildly northernly vantage of Washington, Durr became inescapably convinced of the need for change in her native South. “It was so bad on both black and white. It was such a dreadful situation. The life was built on something that was wrong.”

Washington was also where Durr met Mary Macleod Bethune and other prominent black women active in those infant days of the civil rights movement. By the time Durr and her husband returned to Montgomery, “you see we were different people, we had both changed our opinions and our views.”

Early in the 1950s, E. D. Nixon, a retired sleeping car porter who was head of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, came to Clifford Durr and asked him to take on some civil rights cases. Clifford Durr agreed, and soon he and his wife became the leading liberal members of white Montgomery.

Virginia Durr remembers the time they helped bail Rosa Parks--widely credited with helping to launch the civil rights movement of the 1960s--out of jail. Parks was a seamstress for a Montgomery department store who earned extra money by sewing at nights and on weekends.

One day Parks was just too tired to move back on the bus. For her defiance she was thrown in jail. “I think she was a genuine, gold-plated heroine,” Durr said. “Here she was, making $23 a week, and daring to go to jail.”

Durr and her husband posted the bail and told Parks they would stand by her when she vowed she would take her case all the way to the Supreme Court.

For their strong stand, the Durrs got more than their share of nasty phone calls, and once found the front lawn strewn with biracial pornographic drawings. And in one “most painful thing,” Durr remembers dressing her youngest daughter for a friend’s birthday party. The child was all decked out in her starchy white dress and big blue sash when Durr realized she didn’t know the address of the event. She called the house and there was a pause after she identified herself. “There is no party for your daughter this afternoon,” she was informed.

“It was hard to explain this to your 6-year-old,” she said. “But how could a black mother explain to a black child that she couldn’t drink water from a public fountain?”

Said Durr: “I’m just awfully glad all of that is over now.”

Now the big battle is employment, Durr believes. “What we won was, we got the vote and we got segregation abolished, but now there is a whole new fight to fight. None of it amounts to much if you don’t have a job. The country now has the battle of how to make a living. Much of the South is starving to death.”

Still, Durr retains a kind of pragmatic realism, a hope that change still is possible.

“Sweetie pie,” she said, “when you get to be my age, you hope there is hope. But it’s all got to be done by young people.” And she added: “The only thing I regret is that I won’t be here to do it.”