Background and education Durr was born in
Birmingham, Alabama, where she was raised by black women but was also taught that the
Ku Klux Klan were protectors of southern womanhood. She has written about how her childhood was influenced by “racial innocence,” or a lack of racial consciousness; due to being so closely associated with Black domestic workers. Her eventual loss of innocence would be brought upon by the very same rigid racial hierarchies expected from all members of white Southern society. One of her grandfathers had owned a plantation and slaves, while the other was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. She was presented as a
debutante in 1923. Durr attended
Wellesley College in
Massachusetts from 1920 to 1923. Durr has explicitly acknowledged Wellesley as the catalyst of her moral transformation from a racist to civil rights activist. She came to question segregation after her experience with her college's dining hall. The dining halls had a rotating tables policy that required students to eat meals with random students regardless of their race. Durr, uncomfortable with this idea, protested this rule, but ended up dealing with it after the head of her house threatened to release her from the university if she didn't embrace the rotating tables policy. See
Virginia Durr Moment. Exposure to new environments and new expectations while attending Wellesley College contributed to another aspect of her eventual ideology transformations. The exposure to the new expectations for race and sex in her environment would begin to slowly erode the racism and sexism of her youth, leading to her eventual opposition to segregation and inequality.
Marriage After withdrawing from school in 1923, Virginia Durr returned home to Birmingham, Alabama where she met her future husband
Clifford Durr at church. Virginia Durr and Clifford Durr got married in April, 1926, and had five children. Clifford married Virginia Foster Durr in hopes of her being a house wife and great social figure while he became a very successful and influential
corporate lawyer. While accepting the role of housewife, Virginia was bothered by the condition many workers and their families were in, which she had noticed while volunteering in social work for churches. This realization of the economic opportunities, was one of the earliest aspects of her political growth. At first, however, she viewed the issues through a regional lens rather than viewing them as part of a much larger system of racial and social inequality.
Activism In 1933 Durr moved with her husband to
Washington, D.C. after Clifford was appointed legal counsel to the
Reconstruction Finance Corporation and later Chief Legal Counsel to the Defense Plant Corporation. Eventually it was where they became
New Dealers. It was in Washington where Virginia Durr's activism began. As her political development progressed during this period, she became more acutely aware of the inter-connections among economic injustices, gender inequality, and racial discrimination. She met important people through her husband's New Deal contacts, some of whom changed her conservative views on civil matters. While her husband was working for the
Reconstruction Finance Corporation, Durr joined the
Woman's National Democratic Club. In 1938, she was one of the founding members of the
Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW), an interracial group working to reduce segregation and improve living conditions in the South. The group was formed in part as a response to
Franklin Roosevelt's proclamation that the South was the leading economic problem in the nation. By 1941, Durr became the vice president of the SCHW's civil rights subcommittee. The fact that the poll tax worked to disenfranchise both poor people and women in the South made her work in abolishing the poll tax extremely valuable in her further development as a politician. As she moved from advocating for women's right to vote to critiquing the overall system of inequality that existed in America, she reflected the broadening scope of her politics.
Montgomery In 1951, Durr returned with her husband to
Montgomery, Alabama, where she became acquainted with local civil rights activists like
Rosa Parks,
Aubrey Williams,
E.D. Nixon, and
Myles Horton. Durr's activism started once she joined the local Council of Human Relations, Montgomery's only interracial political organization. She became the "unofficial den mother for young activists," close friend
Dorothy M. Zellner says. Both Clifford and Virginia supported the
Voting Rights Act, as well as provided legal advice to many blacks facing jail time and lawsuits despite the criticism they received from their white colleagues. They supported the
sit-in movement and
Freedom Riders. Virginia and her husband offered sleeping space to students coming from the North to protest. Through the couple's work for civil rights, they became close associates of
E. D. Nixon, who was the president of the Montgomery NAACP chapter. {{external media Virginia Durr met
Rosa Parks through close friend E.D. Nixon, who worked with Parks during his time working with the NAACP. Durr employed Rosa Parks part-time as a seamstress; she sewed for Virginia and her children, and after a while Virginia considered Parks a close friend. In an exclusive interview with
Eyes on the Prize Virginia goes in more depth about their relationship, "I went to see her and took her some clothes and took her some of my daughters' and we, they, they, she fixed the clothes for them and I'd often stay and help her. Mrs. Parks was a really lovely woman." During the summer of 1955,
Myles Horton, a close friend of Durr, asked her to recommend a black person to attend workshops at
Highlander Folk School, the purpose of which was to put into effect the recent
Brown v. Board of Education decision. In March 1965, during the
Selma to Montgomery march, the Durrs housed many of the volunteers in their home. In her autobiography, she recalls “I spent all my time making coffee and frying bacon and eggs for them.” After the boycott, Virginia remained an involved civil rights activist, including working for a variety of organizations such as the
Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. She further assessed his presidential applications in a May 1966 letter a friend: “I know you think I am crazy when I say he expects to be President. But he actually does. He thinks the race issue is going to become more and more the central issue [of American politics], and he is going to arouse hatred all over the whole country, and then pose as their Saviour.”
Later life Clifford Durr died on May 12, 1975, at age 76 and Virginia Durr continued to write and speak about political issues. Mrs. Durr remained active in state and local politics until she was in her nineties. In 1985 she published her autobiography,
Outside the Magic Circle. She continued being politically active until a few years before her death. Virginia Foster Durr died in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, on February 24, 1999, at the age of 95. ==Writings==