Reform, Red Scare, and Ruin: Virginia Durr, Prophet of the New South (review)

T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 308 torney and longtime Mobile mayor Joseph Langan in guiding the Port City through the challenges of the Civil Rights era, and the rise of a new generation of Mobile attorneys personified by such women as Frankie Fields Smith (Mobile’s first black female attorney). Visuals, many of them compelling excerpts from key legal documents from Mobile’s past, complement Erickson’s prose. Examples include the Bienville-era Black Code governing the treatment of slaves in the colony, Major Robert Farmar’s Manifesto issued upon Great Britain’s occupation of Mobile in 1763, and Spain’s Code O’Reilly (a sample provision: “The married woman convicted of adultery, and he who has committed the same with her, shall be delivered up to the will of the husband, with the reserve, however, that he shall not put the one to death, without inflicting the same punishment on the other” [p. 22]). The book offers a bevy of historic illustrations as well—maps, portraits, engravings, and lithographs—making it, at the very least, an attractive addition to any table top in a law firm’s lobby. The final quarter of the book is devoted to histories of law firms and lawyers. The purchase of such placements helped finance the publication of the book and, perhaps not surprisingly, they generally read as the advertisements that they are. This was the same format utilized by Association Publishing’s Lawyers in a New South City, which related the history of the legal profession in Birmingham in an equally fine fashion, and seems to be the modus operandi for this series of books. Fortunately, with their placement at the end of the book, the law firm summaries offer a minimal distraction from the overall effort. Mobile’s Legal Legacy will appeal, of course, to Mobile’s legal community and should, in fact, be considered required reading for the Port City’s present and future attorneys. Even those readers merely interested in Mobile’s general history would be well served by turning to this work for a deeper understanding of the role that the city’s judges and lawyers played in Mobile’s rise to the modern metropolis of today. JIM NOLES Birmingham, Alabama Reform, Red Scare, and Ruin: Virginia Durr, Prophet of the New South. By James Smallwood. Philadelphia: Xlibris, 2008. 301 pp. $22.99. ISBN 9781 -4257-3203-5. Birmingham native and longtime Montgomerian Virginia Durr was among the most dedicated white southern reformers of the twentieth O C T O B E R 2 0 0 9 309 century—a significant figure in American as well as in Alabama history. Her experiences have been chronicled in part in numerous histories of the New Deal, World War II, and civil rights eras; they appear more fully in Holinger Barnard’s edited autobiography, Outside the Magic Circle: The Autobiography of Virginia Foster Durr (Tuscaloosa, 1985), and more recently in Patricia Sullivan’s Freedom Writer: Virginia Foster Durr, Letters from the Civil Rights Years (Athens, Ga., 2006), a contextualized collection of Durr’s passionate and eloquent correspondence. Durr was a tenacious opponent of segregation and an ardent defender of both women’s and labor rights; her activism spanned the New Deal era through the civil rights years and beyond. Her life touched those of many other important figures—from Rosa Parks, whom Durr accompanied home the night of her infamous 1955 arrest in Montgomery, to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, to her brother-in-law, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black. A fascinating, complicated woman who enlivened the pages of the above-mentioned books, Virginia Durr is well worth a biographical study that fully illuminates her life and, through it, her times. Unfortunately, James Smallwood fails to provide such a biography. The author is clearly an admirer of Durr, and he ably recounts some aspects of her life, with the introduction and opening chapter among his strongest. His aim, he tells us early in the book, is a “career biography” that with some exceptions does “not deal with family history except insofar as . . . necessary to explain her public career” (p...