Virginia Foster Durr: A White Champion for Southern Blacks

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 . . . .

Well, you see, the little girl that did it was my nurse's little girl. You see, I was brought up with her. My nurse had a little girl just about my age and I was brought up with her, she and I played together all the time. Now, Nursey didn't live on the place. She had a husband or a beau who would come and get her every night. I forget his name, we just called him Nursey's beau or whatever. He was a tall yellow man and he would come every night and take her home. My mother resented this because she wanted her to stay on the place. So that she would get up with us in the night, I reckon. But anyway, mother liked the servants to live on the place and Nursey refused to live on the place, she went home every night with this tall yellow man. Sarah wasn't his daughter, she was the daughter of the first husband. Sarah and I were just raised together there in the kitchen and played together and I was very fond of her. So, it was Sarah that offered Elizabeth a piece of chicken and she said, "I'm not going to take anything from your black hand, you little nigger." Well, I got furious with her and threw the chicken at her and also tried to throw a knife at her, which got me to bed very promptly, because she said that I had tried to kill her or something. And I was furious. They put me to bed for being so bad. I called her a damn fool, too. Now, how I heard that, I don't know. (laughter) . . .

And the whole family thought that I was just the most vicious child in the whole world. I had said, "Goddamn," and thrown a knife at my cousin. I don't think that they thought about my taking up for Sarah, it was my action toward my cousin. Well, bless God if they didn't all start after me again at the dinner table. "Annie, you've got the worst child that I've ever known, you've got to do something about her." Well, I got mad again and threw a glass of water at my cousin or my aunt, I don't know which. I had another tantrum and I was banished. I went on the back porch again, crying and sat in Nursey's lap and I could hear, it was right outside the dining room door and I heard my aunt say, "Annie, you've got to do something about that child." This was my Aunt May, the fashionable New Yorker, "She is the worst child that I have ever known in my life." She said, "Now, I do think that you have got to do something about that nurse of hers that spoils her so badly. She kisses and hugs that woman all the time. And you know, all those black women have disease and you don't know what she'll catch."

Here I was sitting in Nursey's lap and of course, Nursey heard all of this. My mother didn't take up for Nursey but she took up for me. She did try to take up for her daughter, but she didn't try to take up for her nurse and neither did my grandmother. You see, the nurse had been coming down there for seven years of my life and spending almost every summer and they knew her and they knew what a good woman she was and knew how kind she had been to us and what a faithful servant she was and yet, they did not defend her from this charge of being . . . of course, it was venereal disease that they were talking about. So, Nursey put me to bed that night and lay down by me until I went to sleep and the next morning, she was gone. She had taken her daughter and left and she never came back.

See also how Durr learned to get over her Southern prejudice against eating with black people when she went away to college at Wellesley.

Photo: Encyclopedia of Alabama