Gotham City Soul

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 ba...