Freedom Writer: Virginia Foster Durr, Letters From the Civil Rights Years

by Patricia Sullivan

Virginia Foster Durr was a monumental champion for civil rights. A white southerner who returned to Alabama in 1951 after twenty years in Washington, she was horrified to revisit the racism of her childhood. She wrote hundreds of letters - humorous, sharp and observant - to her friends up north, among them Eleanor Roosevelt, Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson, Hugo Black and C. Vann Woodward.
Published on the 100th anniversary of Durr's birth, her letters offer a distinctive glimpse into the day-to-day battles for racial justice at a pivotal moment in American history.

288 pages, Hardcover

First published July 28, 2003

Reviews

[John Sundman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having read & loved Patricia Sullivan's history of the NAACP, I decided to check out this volume of letters written over the period 1951 to 1968. Durr is an incredible writer and very sharp observer. She and her husband Clifford Durr were true heroes of the Civil Rights movement, although by Virginia's calculus they were merely trying to be decent human beings, not heroes. In fact, they shunned leadership roles and tried to avoid notice. That didn't prevent them from being smeared, ostracized, called up before Congressional kangaroo courts, and so forth. They lived in the very belly of the beast, were at the epicenter of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, were close friends with Rosa Parks and E.D. Nixon. Virgina Durr's letters from Montgomery to her friends in New York, Washington DC, California, etc, are like missives from hell. Spellbinding.

I'm halfway through this book and have made margin notes on nearly every page -- and I'm generally not somebody who writes in books.

Expect a real review after I've read & pondered.