Virginia Foster Durr

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Virginia Foster Durr (August 6, 1903 - February 24, 1999) was an American civil rights activist and lobbyist.

She was raised in Birmingham, Alabama and attended Wellesley College in Massachusetts until she had to leave during her junior year due to financial difficulties.^[1] After returning to Birmingham, she met her future husband, the attorney and Rhodes Scholar Clifford Durr.^[2] In 1933 she moved with her husband to Washington, D.C., where they became New Dealers. While her husband was working for the Reconstruction Finance Corporation,^[3] Durr joined the Woman’s National Democratic Club.^[1] In 1938, she was one of the founding members of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW), an interracial group aimed at lessening segregation in the Southern United States. Working together with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, she lobbied for legislation to abolish the poll tax.^[3]

In 1951 she returned with her husband to Montgomery, Alabama, where she became acquainted with local civil rights activists. A group of people in her town arranged to have integrated church meetings of black and white women. There was a lot of opposition against the integrated meetings, from the locals as well as from within the church. In her autobiography, Mrs. Durr wrote how the head of the United Church Women in the South (UCWS, an integration group) came to one of the meetings. Opponents to the meeting took the license plate numbers from the cars and published them in an Alabama Ku Klux Klan magazine. The women of the UCWS received harassing phone calls. Some had family members who publicly distanced themselves from their activities, because it was bad for business. As a result, the women became too afraid to continue their meetings. In December 1955, Virginia and her husband bailed Rosa Parks out of jail after she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat for a white person.^[2]

Virginia Foster Durr was a supporter of the sit-in movement and Freedom Rights. Virginia and her husband offered sleeping space to students coming from the North to protest. Her husband, with whom she had four children, died in 1975. 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 on February 24, 1999 at the age of 95.^[3] Upon hearing of Durr's death, Rosa Parks said Durr's "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."^[1]

[edit] References

^ ^a ^b ^c Mur Wolf (June 12, 2000). Person of the Week: Virginia Foster Durr. Retrieved on January 17, 2007.
^ ^a ^b Virginia Foster Durr Biography. Retrieved on January 17, 2007.
^ ^a ^b ^c Patricia Sullivan. Virginia Foster Durr Obituary. Retrieved on January 17, 2007.

[edit] Bibliography

Outside the Magic Circle: The Autobiography of Virginia Foster Durr, edited by Hollinger F. Barnard (1985; New York: Simon & Schuster/Touchstone, 1987). ISBN 0-671-63855-6
Freedom Writer: Virginia Foster Durr, Letters from the Civil Rights Years, edited by Patricia Sullivan (New York: Routledge, 2003). ISBN 0-415-94516-X