Virginia Durr; Aristocrat Ostracized for Early Civil Rights Work

Virginia Foster Durr, the former Southern belle who faced a life of ostracism for taking up the cudgel of civil rights and helping Rosa Parks out of jail, has died.

She was 95 and died in her sleep Wednesday at a nursing home in Carlisle, Penn.

Durr was the white matriarch of the civil rights movement, one of the most important white women to stand up to the racial hatred of blacks in the Deep South.

She and her husband, the late Clifford Durr, were instrumental behind the scenes of the Montgomery bus boycott and provided a haven for civil rights workers in their home.

Parks, whose skills as a tailor’s assistant led her to Virginia Durr in the 1950s, said in a statement this week, “I celebrate the life of Mrs. Virginia Durr, whose 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.”

President Clinton praised Durr’s “courage, outspokenness and steely conviction” in the early days of the civil rights movement. Durr, he said Thursday, “helped change this nation forever.”

Historian Studs Terkel once described Durr as the Southern belle who “stepped outside the magic circle” of a charmed life.

Born Virginia Heard Foster to an aristocratic Alabama family in 1903, she grew up on the family plantation, attending debutante balls and tea parties and absorbing the racist attitudes of elite society.

Her mother, Anne Patterson Foster, came from a well-do-to family of governors and legislators. Her father, the Rev. Sterling Foster, grew up on a huge plantation in Union Springs, Ala.

Early Pangs of Conscience

Durr may have inherited an independent streak from her father. A Presbyterian minister, he was thrown out of the church as a heretic because he would not swear a literal belief in the story of Jonah and the whale.

But he was, as Durr would later recall, “a black-belt racist,” steeped in the traditions that upheld the supremacy of whites. Growing up on the family plantation, Durr accepted segregation as normal, although she suffered pangs of conscience from an early age.

In a 1985 autobiography, “Outside the Magic Circle,” Durr recounted “the great trauma of my early life,” her 7th birthday party in the summer of 1910.

It was going to be an extravaganza in pink--pink cake, pink ice cream, pink birthday outfit from the bow in her hair to socks on her feet. But she wanted to invite black children, including the daughter of her nursemaid. Her mother opposed the idea, relenting only after Durr threw a fit. Durr would have a barbecue for her black playmates in the backyard in the morning, and a “proper party” on the front lawn in the afternoon.

At the barbecue, the daughter of Durr’s nursemaid was tearing up the chicken and serving it. But Durr’s cousin Elizabeth refused a piece, exclaiming that she wouldn’t eat anything touched by a “little nigger.” Durr told her cousin to “go to hell” and was sent to bed.

At supper that night, Durr threw a knife at an aunt who criticized her behavior and then took refuge in the lap of her nursemaid. She had heard the aunt insult her nurse, who had raised her from infancy. The nursemaid left the next day and never came back.

Such transgressions aside, Durr entered adolescence firmly a part of the Southern traditions that upheld white supremacy. She rode in a float in an annual Confederate memorial parade and considered herself the embodiment of “pure white Southern womanhood.”

Kathleen Reich, an aide to Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) who conducted an extensive interview with Durr six years ago for a senior thesis at Yale, observed that Durr had learned the racial attitudes of her class.

“I just adopted the attitude of everyone around me, that they were either different or on a lower level,” Durr told Reich.

She tried to follow the customs of the Southern belle--attending balls and amassing beaus--”but I was never quite successful,” she told The Times in 1986. “Unfortunately, I often got bored.”

In 1921 her sister married Hugo Black, a U.S. senator from Alabama and future Supreme Court justice who would later vote with the court for school desegregation. Black, Durr told Reich, “was the first person I ever met who wasn’t a conservative.” The two became close friends. Black admired Durr’s quick mind and urged her father to send her to college.

She enrolled at Wellesley, where her beliefs about race met their first serious challenge. In the dining hall she refused to sit next to a black student and was reprimanded by the dean. “I was from Alabama and my father would have a fit. . . . He would die. I couldn’t do it.” The house mistress gave her a choice: to sit and eat or leave Wellesley. She stayed and ate.

At Wellesley she read Marx and began to grasp the impact of economics. But she was forced to abandon college at the end of her sophomore year when boll weevils destroyed the family’s crops. She returned home and got a job as a law librarian, horrifying her family who thought she surely would end up a spinster.

Her true education began a decade later, after she married Clifford Durr, a New Deal liberal and Alabama lawyer, and moved to Washington in 1933 to help the Franklin D. Roosevelt Administration.

Her husband worked first for the Reconstruction Finance Corp. and later joined the Federal Communications Commission. Durr did volunteer work for the Democratic Party.

Durr became the vice president of the National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax, which prevented women and blacks from voting, and chairwoman of the Washington committee of the progressive Southern Conference for Human Welfare. Although she was still “an absolutely Alabama racist,” she realized that the poll tax could not be defeated without the support of black organizations. Working with activists like black educator Mary McLeod Bethune, she found herself for the first time in the company of people who thought her racial views, her “whole tradition,” were wrong.

Gradually, she shed her naivete. She returned to Montgomery on the eve of the civil rights movement, a changed person but decided to try to keep her political and social views quiet.

Hauled Before Senate Committee

In 1954, however, she was hauled before a U.S. Senate committee on subversive activity chaired by Sen. James Eastland of Mississippi, accused of conspiring with Eleanor Roosevelt to leak national secrets to the Russians. Durr refused to testify, powdering her nose before the committee in a image of defiance that made front pages around the country.

That episode, she said later, freed her of the last shackles of Southern politesse.

“It put me into the fray and I loved it. I felt free,” she wrote in 1985. “If Jim Eastland hadn’t called us up before his committee saying we were trying to overthrow the government by force and violence, I think we could have lived in Alabama for years” in peace. But “Eastland put us on the front page of the paper, so after that we couldn’t.”

Her husband took on civil rights cases and gave the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. legal advice. Their home became a safe house for Freedom Riders like Tom Hayden, now a California state senator from Los Angeles.

Hayden crashed at her Montgomery home one night after being released from jail. “There was a halo around her wherever you went in the movement,” Hayden said Thursday. “She was one of those special people who despite being white was there right from the beginning, when the white community was almost 100% segregationist or silent or both. She was revered and respected for being ahead of the time.”

When Parks was arrested on Dec. 1, 1955, for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white rider, the Durrs helped arrange her release on bail. Virginia Durr was the first to greet her when she was released.

Durr wrote of her stark terror at seeing mobs attack Freedom Riders, calling it “the most horrible hating I have ever seen.” But she feared even more for her children, who were outcasts as much as their parents.

The Durrs’ lawn was strewn with biracial pornographic drawings. The most painful event was when her daughter was 6 and invited to a birthday party. Durr decked the child out in a starchy white dress with a festive blue sash when she realized she didn’t know the address of the party. When she called the house there was a long pause after she identified herself. Then she was told “there is no party for your daughter this afternoon.”

Her husband’s law practice steadily lost business. The harassment of the Durrs reached its apex in 1960, when Nat Hentoff wrote a profile of them in the The New Yorker that thinly veiled their identities. The Durrs were denounced on the street and in the local press.

Their status improved in the early ‘60s, after the civil rights workers from the North began spreading stories of their heroism.

Several years ago she told an interviewer that she had no regrets about those years and noted that some of the people who had spurned her had changed their minds about what she did.

She lamented that many challenges remained in the fight for black equality, particularly in the employment arena.

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

Durr is survived by four daughters, Ann Lyon of Harrisburg, Pa., Lucy Hackney of Philadelphia, Miss., Tilla Durr of Washington, and Lulah Colan of Milwaukee; 11 grandchildren and a great-grandchild. A memorial is scheduled for Sunday at Immanuel Presbyterian Church in Montgomery.