Virginia Foster Durr and Rosa Parks
Your Head Trucker once had the privilege to get a glimpse of a great civil rights champion whose name ought to be more famous than it is: Virginia Foster Durr.
Back in the mid-1980's when I was dating a smart, sexy redheaded guy in Montgomery, we went to the Alabama Shakespeare Festival a few times to catch some plays. On one of those occasions, as we were walking through the parking lot towards the theater building, he nudged me and said, "Look, that's Virginia Durr." I turned and saw a very small, white-haired lady conversing animatedly with a friend as they strolled up to the entrance.
No, I didn't go say hello or ask for an autograph or anything; I'm not that pushy. Still, it was a memorable moment actually to see someone who, with her attorney husband, had figured so prominently in the civil rights struggle in Alabama. Among other things, they are the ones who went and bailed Rosa Parks out of jail after her famous refusal to move to the back of the bus in 1955, and he represented her in court.
Well, while sitting here tonight waiting for my supper to cook, I was surfing around here and there, and came across the wonderful oral history interview she gave in 1975, now available through the awesome Documenting the American South online history collection from the University of North Carolina. Tons of great reading there, if you like history. Lots of stuff that ought to be required reading in school.
In particular, the extensive Durr interview is fascinating, and I hope some of my truckbuddies will dip into it. Here I want to present just a little excerpt that illustrates what I was saying in my post the other day about how white Southerners felt about the blacks in their midst. This excerpt and its continuation are about an incident in 1910, when Durr was a girl of 7, living on her wealthy grandmother's plantation in rural Alabama; but the racial attitudes illustrated by the story were still very much in operation fifty years later, when I was coming up. Notice the part about venereal disease, which is something I was told, too, in all seriousness.
This time, I was seven years old and I was going to school the next fall. I always had my birthday in the back yard with the black children and we would have barbeque and they would let us barbeque over a little pit that they would dig for us. So, this time, my mother and grandmother and aunts and all said that I had to have it in the front yard and with just the white children, no black children could come to the party. Well, I got very angry about that and the main thing was that I wanted the barbeque. (laughter) You see, they would dig a pit in the back yard, which was sandy, and then the cook would give us chickens and we would build a grill over the hole and build a fire and then we were allowed to baste the chickens and turn them over and of course, by the time that we got through, they were full of sand, but to me, (this had been my usual birthday party) and to me, this was a great event. Here I was presiding over the chickens, you know. Well, anyway, I had a tantrum at breakfast and made strong protest about the party in the afternoon and no barbeque. So, they agreed that I could have the barbeque in the morning and the party in the afternoon. This was the compromise that they reached. . . .
Well, Elizabeth, Aunt May's daughter was there and Aunt May would bring a French maid with her when she came, if you can imagine. You can imagine how happy the French maid was. (laughter) Aunt May, as you could say, really put on airs. Anyway, Elizabeth was always dressed up in these beautiful dresses with sashes and everything matching and her hair curled . . . .
She was a little older than I was, about my sister's age. So, we had the barbeque and everything was going on fine and we were dividing up the chicken and one of the little black girls was tearing up the chicken and she offered a piece to Elizabeth and Elizabeth, who must have felt like an outcast in this group anyway, she all of a sudden said, "Don't you give me any chicken out of that black hand of yours. I'm not going to eat any chicken that your black hand has touched, you little nigger." . . .
Continued after the jump . . . .
