As we entered the meeting room, we knew this would be no ordinary lecture. The Windsor rocking chair with a scrapbook and needlepoint pillow, the frame with crocheted white gloves, the small table with a sepia photograph in a silver frame, a silver tea service and a crocheted tablecloth, the more recent photograph of a gray-haired smiling woman—and then the Rev. Dr. Barbara Jamestone entered in black skirt and red shirt with her hair "done up."
In her short introduction, Rev. Jamestone introduced us to the basic facts of Virginia Durr's life: she lived from 1903 to 1999, with perhaps her most famous act coming in 1955 when she accompanied her husband to Montgomery's jail where he posted bond for Rosa Parks — and then Virginia Durr hugged Parks when she stepped out of the jail. Jamestone told the story of her own childhood observation of a civil rights march, acknowledging the racism rampant in those days. "The soil in which those isms grew is still with us. Not just in my town in the heart of Dixie, but in your town, too."
Then the Rev. Jamestone pinned on a crochet collar and transformed herself into a cousin of Virginia Durr being interviewed, bringing to life through her words a Virginia Durr as the Rev. Jamestone came to know her, not directly, but through interviews and through Durr's autobiography, Outside the Magic Circle.
Durr, we learned, was raised in a family of contradictions. It was a family where her father was proud that not a single "colored person," even among those who could afford the poll tax, could then answer the qualifying questions he'd create to keep them from the polls. Her mother instilled in her the important rules about social differences that must be respected. In Virginia's childhood world, there were people with money, and people who earned money. You could talk with and even love the "colored cook" but you wouldn't sit down and eat dinner with her.
But it was also a world where her father lost his position as a Presbyterian minister because he could not lie and tell an examining committee that he accepted the literal truth that Jonah was swallowed by a whale. And it was also a world where her mother "dispelled the devil and hell" from Virginia's life early, teaching her of God's acceptance and love. It was a family that believed in speaking up for truth, but that wanted a woman to wear white gloves and spend her time doing fancy work.
Her family sent her to Wellesley College, where her attitudes began to shift when she realized that she could eat at the same table as a "Negro girl" and her world wouldn't fall apart. Virginia wanted to be a belle but she gave up early, because belles don't ask questions and Virginia couldn't help but ask questions.
Cliff and Virginia Durr went to Washington, DC, as part of the New Deal, and Virginia entertained and socialized as a political wife and belle was expected to, and as her sister, married to Senator and later Justice Hugo Black did. But she did something more than her sister did: she became active in causes herself, notably working against the poll tax which disenfranchised women and African Americans.
She and her husband were victims of red-baiting in the 1950s, but "nothing much scared Virginia." Cliff was not reappointed to the FCC when he refused to take the Truman-era loyalty oath. When she was called to testify before the Senate's Internal Security committee, and was interrogated by Senator Jim Eastland, she denied she was a communist and refused to answer any other of the probing questions. Cliff, her husband, was outraged at the questions and said that he'd had to give away all his guns when he returned home, for fear he'd go kill Jim Eastland. Virginia suspected that "they just didn't like me because I was a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt."
Spied on by the FBI, ostracized by neighbors, never quite understood by family, the Durrs persisted in their support of civil rights and other causes considered a bit odd for their time and social standing. Their daughters went north to school "when things got bad" but the Durrs persisted in supporting liberal causes. Cliff Durr was the founding President of the Montgomery UU Fellowship (Virginia never became a UU), and we heard about the trials of that fellowship as it was turned out of many a rental meeting place for taking assertive stands for racial justice.
The Rev. Jamestone brought alive some realities of Southern life and she also brought alive a woman who helped to change those realities. Jamestone ended her presentation by reading from the scrapbook a paragraph written at the time of Virginia Durr's death: "She chose a harder path than she had to and paid a price for it... History has proved her right."
Most of the audience tearfully expressed their appreciation for this hour of insight into an untypical life. The members of the Montgomery UU Fellowship — including people who had known Virginia Durr and even a cousin of Clifford Durr's — were enthusiastic in their appreciation for the presentation.
