A Southern Belle Raising Hell

And so at the age of 94 Lady Bird Johnson has died and instead of thinking about her, all I can think about is a friend of hers, Virginia Durr, a fellow Southern belle, but that is where the comparison ends.

Virginia Foster Durr and her husband Clifford were civil rights activists. Not extraordinary until you consider the time and the place: 1950s and 1960s Alabama. And their pedigree: Had they been anything other than WASPs, had they been able to offer any reason for their “misguided” behavior to their disapproving neighbors in Montgomery, Alabama, they might have been forgiven. But the Durrs were both from plantation families. Their ancestors had been wealthy aristocrats. It just didn’t seem possible that two people from such privilege would care about blacks or their civil rights. Simply put, they didn’t have to “go there”. But the Durrs, who had never kept their beliefs a secret, made their position very clear and very public in December of 1955 when they posted the $100 bond to bail out of jail Mrs. Rosa Parks, a local seamstress and friend who had been arrested for refusing to give up her seat on the bus to a white man.

By that time the Durrs had been involved in politics and social issues for nearly 20 years, often taking on unpopular causes, such as the abolition of high poll taxes levied by Southern states to keep black from voting. During the late 1940s and 1950s, the Durrs openly criticized President Harry S Truman’s Cold War policies, insisting that he let the government go too far in his hunt to root out Communists.

After living in Virginia for two years, the Durrs moved back to Alabama in 1951, settling in Montgomery after Clifford Durr’s law practice in Washington D.C. dried up. Virginia struggled with her role as an activist. She had grown up as a proper Southern belle, and shedding that persona under the withering stares of Alabama society was difficult. She was forced to send her children up North to shield them from the epithets of “nigger lover” and “Communist” that were sent their way. She tried to fly under the radar. Yet she realized that if Southern whites did not speak up, no real progress was going to be made. She joined the NAACP, organized black and white women, and opened her home to civil rights workers, journalists, and other like-minded individuals.

Durr wrote from the front lines of the movement to friends who included Eleanor Roosevelt, Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson (she wrote extensively to LBJ, especially) and her brother-in-law, the Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, sending them unvarnished reports full of passion and wit. When she died in 1999 at the age of 95, she left behind a valuable chronicle. Do yourself a favor read it Freedom Writer: Virginia Foster Durr: Letters from the Civil Rights Years, by Patricia Sullivan. If you don’t want to buy it, check it out of the library (although it looks like two of the four copies in the New York Public Library system have been made away with; it's that good). If you don’t have a library card, I’ll lend you my copy.


Virginia Durr never considered anything she did remarkable: “It seems to me that we were not particularly shocking people at all,” she wrote a close friend. “We just faced so many shocking situations—Depression, WW II, the Red Hunt, the Bomb and its aftermath, the Loyalty Oath and the race issue in the South—it seems to me that the Events themselves were the shocking things and if they had not come to us we would have stayed as we were—good Presbyterians, white supremacists, Junior League, Garden Clubs, etc. . . . I do not regret that we were stirred up at all.”