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Virginia Durr
In 1922, sophomore Virginia Foster was faced with the college's "rotating tables" policy, which required students to eat meals at tables with random groups of fellow students, including African Americans. When she protested the policy, her Head of House explained that she could choose between abiding by the policy, or withdrawing from Wellesley College. This daughter of an Alabama Presbyterian minister chose to stay at Wellesley, where she found intellectual stimulation in the classroom, and nourishment for the body, and ultimately the soul, in the socially, racially and ethnically integrated Claflin Hall dining room. Although she was considered a member of the class of 1925, she was forced to leave Wellesley in 1923, due to a family financial crisis. Wellesley College's annual tuition was a steep $800 at the time. She then returned to Birmingham, AL, where she became vice president of the Junior League and accepted a job in the Birmingham Bar Library. There, she met her future husband, Alabama attorney and Rhodes Scholar, Clifford Durr, who was initially impressed by her ability to track down legal information. They married in 1926. In 1932, the Durrs moved to Washington for what was to have been a 3 month stay. Clifford Durr accepted an assignment, assisting President Roosevelt with the reopening of banks closed by the Depression. The planned 3 months turned into 16 years, during which time Clifford Durr held a variety of posts. In Washington, Virginia Durr joined the Woman's National Democratic Club. Her contact with political activists ignited her own activist tendencies. She found the poll tax, which primarily disenfranchised blacks and women, particularly offensive. She worked closely and tirelessly with liberal political leaders including Senator Lyndon Johnson, Representative Claude Pepper and civil rights reformer Mary McLeod Bethune to garner the necessary support for legislation which culminated in the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the demise of the poll tax. In 1938, Virginia Durr became a founding member of the Southern Conference on Human Welfare. On the second day of that nascent organization's opening convention in Birminham, AL, those in attendance went head to head with infamous Birmingham Chief of Police, Eugene "Bull" Connor, who threatened to arrest anyone who crossed racial lines by sitting on the "wrong" side of the meeting hall. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt responded by placing her chair directly on top of the line separating blacks from whites. Because of Clifford and Virginia Durr's controversial positions on issues of race, they fell out of favor with a large segment of the white community in Birmingham. Nevertheless, the Durrs were not deterred from their efforts to erode institutionalized racism. Regarding her lifelong work toward achieving that end, Virginia Durr said, "The problem is, once you open a gate, there's another and another gate beyond each one. It makes you think you want to live forever to continue the work......." In December, 1955, Virginia and Clifford Durr bailed seamstress Rosa Parks out of jail after she was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to give up her seat to a white man on one of the city's segregated buses. Upon learning of Virginia Durr's death, Rosa Parks commented that Mrs. 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." In her later years, Virginia Durr included support for nuclear disarmament, in her repertoire of causes worth fighting for. "If we all go up in radioactive dust, it won't matter what sex or race or religion we are," she said. Virginia Durr died on February 24, 1999. For more information about Virginia Durr, see her autobiography, Outside the Magic Circle: The Autobiography of Virginia Foster Durr. Edited by Hollinger F. Barnard, with a Forward by Studs Terkel, University of Alabama Press,1985. For photos of Virginia Durr in 1993, see: Written by Mur Wolf
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Lessons
learned at the dinner table at Wellesley College set into motion
the major transformation of Wellesley Person of the Week, Virginia
(Foster) Durr '25, from a self-described "deep-dyed Southern bigot"
to an activist, organizer and leader in our nation's civil rights
movement.
