Grace and guts

Virginia Durr

Vol. 7, No. 5, 1985, pp. 17-21

Steve Suitts:

I have the privilege of introducing Virginia Durr, a remarkable Alabamian whose life, spanning more than eight decades of Southern history, chronicles the best aspirations of our region. In the great movements which the South has witnessed, which it has endured, and which it has triumphed in this century, Virginia Durr has been an irreplaceable part. It started even as she was a child.

At the age of six, in Birmingham, she went out to take a place in the day’s great crusade–for prohibition in Alabama. Virginia, the daughter of one of Birmingham’s most respected Presbyterian ministers got ready to march. She was handed a sign that read: “Please save my father from the demon rum.”

Even at six she knew that the daughter of a well-known minister ought not make such a public declaration. For the first and perhaps only time, she decided to forgo participation in a political movement.

Not too much later, when across the South working people began to organize and the struggle of the times became one between labor and capital, Virginia Durr took up with labor. When the Depression hit, Virginia-vice-president of the Junior League of Birmingham–didn’t see just the small niceties of country club parties, she saw the hungry bellies. She saw the children wearing flour sacks, and she began to make a difference in the way she lived her life and in the way that people had to endure their lives in the South.

Ten years before the creation of the Southern Regional Council, Virginia Durr became one of the young men and

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women who went to Washington with the New Deal. When Franklin D. Roosevelt declared that the South was the nation’s “number one economic problem,” Virginia Durr already knew that. She was already working with a variety of Southerners concerned with the problems of poverty.

Virginia Durr was never, thank God, the soul of discretion. When, after World War II, the nation began to tolerate the intolerance of McCarthyism, when white liberals separated themselves from long-time friends and stood silent when they were persecuted, Virginia Durr stood up and shrieked in protest. When people were ostracized, Virginia Durr would invite the accused to dinner and drinks. She protested that people cannot be guilty by their associations.

Twenty-five years before the creation of the Southern Regional Council’s Voting Rights Project, Virginia Durr knew that one of the keys to a democratic South lay in the voting rights of blacks and poor whites. She successfully led the anti-poll tax efforts throughout the region and in the halls of Washington.

Now for most people that would be a lifetime of accomplishment. But Virignia Durr was only getting started. When she returned to Alabama from Washington–because she would not hold her peace during the days of McCarthyism–she continued to work and to live a life which deserves all honor. When Rosa Parks decided she was not going to get up on the bus, Virginia Durr was there supporting that effort as an activist, as a friend, and as a white liberal.

When the Civil Rights Movement began to grow, the Durr farm near Montgomery was a center of activism, of retreat, and of planning for the defense of the defenseless. Long days and nights were spent there by many prominent leaders–and by many whom you never will know.

During the development of the anti-poverty programs, and later, the anti-war movement, the Durr farm continued to be a place where young men and women could understand that there had been others who came before them and that these would be others who would suppport them.

With the advent of the feminist movement, Virginia Durr was there. She said, “I’ve been doing that all my life.” And she had. When it comes to speaking her mind, Virginia makes a few exceptions about being a Southern lady.

And now, in this age in which not fear but indifference causes inaction, Virginia Durr’s continues to be the voice of encouragement. She is a woman who combines grace and guts. Her upbringing and even her voice reminds us of the accent of an aristocrat, of Southern high culture. But her beliefs, her actions, and her works are those of an egalitarian.

It’s hard for me to recall Virginia without also recalling Cliff Durr. Their lives together showed how social commitment and personal loyalty to another can be lovingly and effectively combined. When Virginia faced Mississippi’s Jim Eastland before the Senate witch hunt committee that he conducted in the South to find the communists and bolsheviks, she said, “My name is Virginia Durr. I’m the wife of Cliff Durr.” A woman whose accomplishments were her own, she recalled herself in association with the person she most loved.

For a long time Virginia said about her sister Josephine and her brother-in-law Hugo Black that their lives were a marriage of justice and mercy. Virginia should know. For she is one of the region’s models of both cherished qualities. Today we’re privileged to have a Southerner whose contributions to a democratic South have been a mighty force in shaping the opportunties that exist in the region. But just as important, Virginia Durr has given us the loveliest example of how to conduct a life with a commitment of love for those around us.

Virginia Durr:

I have to explain that a few of the remarks just made about me, which were absolutely beautiful, were not true. The only reason I went to a prohibition meeting when I was age six is that my uncle, Malcolm Patterson, who was the governor of Tennessee, was running on a prohibition ticket. I went to hear him speak and ask people for votes, which he didn’t get.

I got interested in the labor movement in Birmingham because my brother in-law, Hugo Black, was the lawyer for the unions. He used to have terrific fights with Forney Johnson who represented the big corporations. Because they didn’t have any workman’s compensation, Hugo would win big awards from juries. So I’d go to the courts sometimes to hear him argue.

I was delighted to hear that my father was a distinguished Presbyterian preacher with the South Highland Church in Birmingham. But my father actually was thrown out of the church. There’s a reason if you want to hear it.

My grandfather, who lived in Union Springs, Alabama, was quite well off. He thought the Civil War was the stupidest thing in the wide world and the “fire-eaters” as he called them, William L. Yancey and all, he couldn’t stand. So he sent his cotton to Liverpool and told the merchants there to save his money until after the War. Nearly everybody else in Alabama had nothing but Confederate money–which wasn’t worth starting a fire with–but he had gold.

I was brought up to be very much ashamed of him because he wasn’t a Confederate. My other grandfather had fought with General Nathan Bedford Forrest and was in the last battle at Selma; he was the hero of the family–this great dashing Confederate Colonel. But my grandfather in

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Indian Springs was not mentioned very much except that he was rich–“thank God.”

My father had the opportunity of a very good education. He went to Southwestern, then to Hampden-Sydney, then Princeton, and on to Edinburgh in Scotland. He travelled to Berlin and Heidelberg. He went to the Holy Land. When he came back from his long tour he had some slight doubts in his mind as to whether every word in the Bible was literally true and dictated by God. He wrestled with it for a long time but he never said much about it.

In fact, I used to go to church, Sunday School, evening service on Sundays, prayer meeting on Thursday night. We’d have morning prayers every morning and I’d sit there praying for food.

In those days, preachers sent you to hell at every meeting, and hell wasn’t just somewhere down yonder, it was right under the floor. So I grew up in absolute terror of hell.

My father preached hell fire and damnation but he did have his doubts. One day the session of the Presbysterian Church came to him and said they’d suspected he wasn’t really very orthodox, in fact they thought he was heretical. They told him he had to swear that he absolutely believed that the whale swallowed Jonah and then spat him up alive three days later just as happy and healthy as he ever was. They said they’d give him a week to decide.

My poor father came home and walked up and down for a week. We took him coffee. My mother cried. I was only seven or eight, and I cried. My brother and my sister cried.

He was in a terrible fix for a man in his forties. He had a wife and three children, and while his mother had that plantation down in Union Springs, you know it wasn’t as good as it used to be in the old slavery days.

At the end of the week he came back and said he didn’t believe it. They threw him out of the whole Southern Presbyterian Church and declared him to be a heretic. And I swear to God that it was easier to be raised in Birmingham as a communist than as a heretic.

My father had to go into business, and of course he wasn’t trained to go into business. And, I hate to tell this, but my father had been raised in the days just after slavery and he really thought every black person had been born to wait on him. So to be poor and struggling too, and he went into an insurance business where he sold insurance to black people.

Steve Suitts said in his introduction how aristocratic I was, well, I can assure you the poorer we got the more aristocratic we became.

But you see my trouble has been–and the reason that I have caused so many rifts–is because I cannot differentiate between politics and people. If I get into a movement, then I like the people or I don’t like them. So when I got into the civil rights movement, I liked the people in the movement. I really adored Mrs. Mary McLeod Bethune. I felt like they were fighting for me. I was fighting, but they were fighting for me.

Because to be a sweet Southern girl in the South during the days that I grew up you were just like you were a prisoner. You couldn’t do anything. You couldn’t even kiss the boys without feeling guilty. The great ambition of a Southern girl’s life was to marry well.

I got into voting rights and civil rights almost by chance. I got to Washington during the New Deal. My husband was working in the Reconstruction Finanace Corporation. I was free to go into town and take part in the women’s division of the Democratic National Committee. I was urged to do that by my brother-in-law, Hugo Black. Hugo really believed that women’s place was in the home; he certainly believed that his wife’s place was in the home. But he encouraged me–I never knew why, but he did.

So I went in and got thrown immediately into the fight to get rid of the poll tax. I won’t go all into that, but we did get rid of it. Now everybody can vote. And, in Alabama, guess who they vote for? Year after year after year? George Wallace. They voted for him over and over and over and they’ll probably vote for him this time if he’s breathing.

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Then came the question of the segregation and one heroine of that era in the South was Rosa Parks. My husband went down and got her out of jail.

When you talk about heroines, you take a woman who makes twenty-three dollars a week in Montgomery, who has a sick husband, sick mother–she has to support these two people herself. Living in a public housing project. And she’s a very well-educated woman.

As you know, there were a number of Yankee women who came South after the Civil War and started missionary schools for black women. The school that Rosa Parks attended there in Montgomery was called Mrs. White’s School. These Yankee school teachers taught these black women reading, writing and arithmetic–but also to be citizens.

Rosa Parks claimed the right of being a citizen of the United States. She sat there on that bus and was arrested and taken to jail. But it was a beginning of the end of segregation.

What we have to tackle now is poverty–no jobs, no money, nothing for people to do. And infant mortality. Let me give you an example.

Is anybody here a Baptist? Well don’t get your feelings hurt when I talk about the Baptists and what happened in Montgomery, Alabama.

The Baptist Hospital in Montgomery, Alabama is the biggest hospital in the city. It has a fine neo-natal care center and doctors who make lot of money. It has a beautiful statue out front: Jesus holding out his arms, saying, “Suffer all little children to come unto me.” So poor, pregnant women–many of them teenagers–began to bring the little children unto them. They brought them from hither and yon, from all over South Alabama.

What did the hospital do? They closed the beds. Those big white bellied Baptists closed those beds and said, “If they can’t pay, they’ve just got to die.” And they didn’t even take the statue of Jesus down.

Well, my son-in-law got real mad. He’s a very nice guy, although he is a Yankee, he’s not as much a Yankee as he used to be. He led several marches and helped get back some of the beds, not all of them by any means. NQW this is a rich hospital with a rich bunch of trustees and what they’re doing is killing these children.

Now people tell me, “You can’t go back to the New Deal. The New Deal is over. It’s a new time.”

Well it may be a new time, but hell, the New Deal took people who were without jobs–black and white–and put them to work. They had WPA and CCC and NYA and PWA.

And I think the government ought to give people jobs now. And if it takes public ownership of the means of production–now that’s a serious phrase, that’ll get you in jail every time if you say it at the wrong place. But I believe that to let people be idle and let the country go to hell while we put all our money into Star Wars is insane.

I believe all the nice things I’ve heard this morning about what to do about food stamps, or about public housing, or

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about learning a new skill. But what the hell use is it to learn a new skill when you can’t get a job?

We’ve got to do something. Fiddling around isn’t going to do any good. I don’t think we can just make it a little better here and a little better there. We’ve got to do something more drastic.

Now you all in Georgia have the lousiest bunch of congressmen–except for Wyche Fowler–that I have ever known. We have an even worse bunch of congressmen in Alabama. We have a crazy man, a senator named Denton. I mean he’s not just crazy in a polite sense of the word, he’s crazy in the medical sense of the word.

And, of course, you cannot run for office in Montgomery, Alabama, or anywhere unless you get on a television. And the people who get on the television the most seem to get elected the most. In Montgomery we’ve got Bill Dickinson, probably the worst congressman in the United States. He’s on the television every fifteen minutes because he’s paid for by the war contractors. He is the head of an armed services committee.

So, are we going to be run by this bunch of bastards or not? I mean this is what we get down to. They’re corrupt. They’re stupid. They’re absolutely lacking in any compassion. And Reagan is the worst.

Are we going to sit here and go to hell with the atomic bomb and become specks of dust or are we going to get busy and get mad and do something?

I mean Meese, Reagan–they’re just such terrible people, they’re not even real. They’re just reflections of tv or movies. We’ve got to get busy because the people who are now running the country seem determined to destroy us. We’ve got to get together and stand up for ourselves or we’re all going to be dead.

During the forty-first anniversary meeting of the Southern Regional Council, held in Atlanta in early November, civil rights advocate Virginia Durr spoke at a luncheon held in honor of the publication of her autobiographical recollections. (Virginia Durr’s book, Outside the Magic Circle, edited by Hollinger Rarnard of Birmingham, is available from the University of Alabama Press.) Below, Southern Changes presents excerpts from Virginia’s luncheon talk, as well as the introductory comments of SRC executive director Steve Suitts. Steve Suitts.

The Biggest Texan: John Henry Faulk 1913-1990

By Virginia Durr

Vol. 12, No. 2, 1990, pp. 15-17

Editor’s note: When John Henry Faulk died in Texas on April 9, 1990, many people lost a treasured friend and this nation lost one of its most passionate and articulate advocates of free speech. One of Faulk’s friends and fellow first amendment advocates was Virginia Foster Durr, a life member of the Southern Regional Council, who remembers John Henry here-with a few digressions-as an entertainer, a friend, and a down-home defender of particular American values.

John Henry had a room in New York City. He was just getting on the radio at CBS then and I was in New York with my daughter Lucy and another friend. Mary Price was running the Southern Conference for Human Welfare office in New York and she had arranged for us to stay in John Henry Faulk’s apartment. This was during the end of the war, about 1945. Well, we got there and his apartment was in the home of Pete Seeger’s mother-in-law. She came from a very old family in Virginia not far from where we lived [the Durrs lived in Washington, D.C., at this time, where Clifford Durr was a member of the Federal Communications Commission].

She [Seeger’s mother-in-law] had married a Japanese who was a prince or something. We first knew Pete Seeger because he had called us when he had taken his family in a van and gone down to Florida. He had his father-in-law with him who was a resident in Virginia. On the way [they were still in Virginia] they stopped with a picnic lunch in a park. Anyway, he called us and said his father-in-law was in jail. He had been arrested because in the park there was a sign that said, “Nobody but Aryans.” He wasn’t black but he was Japanese. My husband knew somebody there in [forgets the town]. He had to pay a $25 fine and we sent him the money. The lawyer got them out of jail and Pete sent his family on on the train and he was going to drive the van on back. The old man was shook up because he had never been arrested before for being a non-Aryan. He was upset about it.

But he got out of jail and that night Pete stayed over

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with us and said he wanted to pay us back for what we had done. He wanted to do a concert and he asked me if I could get some people to come and I got twenty-five people together. So we had a Pete Seeger concert all to ourselves for about five hours. The next time I saw Pete was in London and he had sold out every ticket six months before: 12,OOO seats. We got hold of him and had tea with him and he offered us two tickets but unfortunately we had another engagement. He was just on top of the world. I’ve never seen anybody as exultant and happy and thrilled as he was. He felt like a new day was dawning. He’s a very attractive man.

Anyway, John Henry knew Pete Seeger. They were both folk singers, you see, and John Henry had a room from his mother-in-law. They had a house down in the Village there. When we got there we went to bed. There were two beds in the room and my daughter was in my bed and I woke up and there was a man wandering around the room. He said, ‘What are you doing in my room?’ I said, ‘This is John Henry Faulk’s room,’ and he said, ‘I guess we’re roommates.’ He told me to go on back to sleep and we did.

Early the next morning John Henry came by and picked up my daughter Lucy to be on his radio show. All she was supposed to do was yell ‘Whoopee!’ or something like that but she was thrilled to death to be on the CBS show with John Henry Faulk. After that he got more and more prominent and got on the big shows.

From the standpoint of oratory he was just terrific. He was very funny and very amusing. A terribly charming fellow. He was just doing fine. He was married and divorced and then married again. He had several children. He had three wives and the last was an English girl, and Yohan was her child. He was very close to him. John Henry was doing fine and made lots of money and was getting to be kind of a super luminary in the fifties after the war.

Then the Red Scare began. He was on the CBS news and one of the sponsors was a grocery chain and it seems John Henry addressed the unions. They accused him of being a Red. Palmer Weber was another Southerner, and he made a lot of money on Wall Street and he persuaded John Henry to fight the suit against him. They took years and years to fight the suit but in the meanwhile he stopped being a super luminary and he lost all the jobs he had.

No one thing happened to him-just making speeches before the unions, red unions as they called them. It was this grocery chain that was after him and that brought the suit against having him on the radio. John Henry would sing at union meetings. He would tell delightful, funny stories and act them out on stage. But he got into such a bad fix that his wife left him. He came back down to Austin, Texas, and he was really just as poor as Job’s turkey. He managed to make a living the last 20-odd years by teaching and speaking on the radio.

For a while he had a big public radio broadcast from Dallas that went all over the state of Texas. This was after the bad press Dallas had gotten on account of the death of John Kennedy.

So ho wanted to go on the air and make Texas seem more attractive to people. But this was a liberal outfit and the Ku Klux had gotten after them and had gotten on their wire, on their frequency. John Henry had Cliff [Durr] come down to speak on the radio show on the first amendment and when he started to speak this voice came out of the blue and said, ‘We know who you are. You damned lowdown communist nigger lover from Alabama. George Wallace has told us about you.’ It was the most dreadful thing that ever happened. John Henry would try to say something and they would come on and say, ‘Aw, you act like a country boy but you’re nothing but a damned lowdown communist nigger lover.’

It was truly terrible. It was the complete end of free speech because this Klansman or whoever he was…segregationist…had taken over the public radio system. That night he was asked to be on a statewide radio system and we went to the show and the same thing happened there-‘Damned nigger lover.’-I never did know how they managed to break in that way but John Henry had to give that show up because he couldn’t handle it, really.

[Still] he was one of the most happy, cheerful people I’ve ever known in my life. His great belief in the world was in free speech, the first amendment. He supported my brother-in-law Hugo Black and Bill Douglass. What’s so amazing is that these people who had everybody against them-my husband, Palmer Weber, John Henry-stood up for free speech, and a ‘nigger loving communist’ was about as lowdown as they could call you, and they did it if you stood up for free speech. It was very difficult to make a living. People seemed to have gone crazy in a way. These racial feelings that had been around for generations were augmented by this vague communist threat. So John Henry really had a big problem. He got blacklisted and always had a hard time after that.

But he was a great hero. His last years were torture when he had cancer because it was behind his eyes and they couldn’t get at it. When he died he was full of pain. I talked to him on the phone just before he died and he was as cheerful as could be.

He came to visit in Montgomery a number of times. He was part of the Conference for Human Welfare and did a great deal of speaking and traveling. You have to realize how delightful he was, and charming and humorous. All these men that I mentioned, they were augmented by their love of the South and their state. John Henry was the biggest Texan there ever was in the world. He got a job under Lyndon Johnson but they went after him and he had to withdraw it. I was wanting to get away myself. I didn’t

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have that devotion to the South like Cliff had. In any case we stayed and I’m still here. I’ve gotten very fond of Montgomery, Alabama, but we are on the bottom of every list about things like poverty and education.

But John Henry was so funny. He would change his personality and be Uncle Bud and Aunt Mamie and Cousin Rosa Lee or whatever. He would play the part of these country people in Texas come to town. He was a very dramatic person. The oil industry almost ruined Texas and John Henry didn’t get any of that money and I don’t know how he lived but he stayed in Texas.

The last time I went down to see him I went with him to a university and he got an overwhelming ovation. This was before Cliff died in 1975. He spoke a lot at universities. I think he had just gotten a job at a university in west Tennessee but he died. He was also a playwright. But young people today don’t even know his name outside of Texas. This is a sad time you know. John Henry has died and Walker Percy died and Myles Horton up at Highlander. All these people are like the-John Henry’s death was in the New York Times and the Washington Post but nobody mentioned it here. Walker Percy was in the paper, but of course he is a native Alabamian.

Virginia Durr’s recollections of John Henry Faulk were recorded, transcribed and edited by George Littleton.