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6 Belles, Wives, and Public Lives, Part II Virginia Foster Durr, Lindy Claiborne Boggs, and Lylah Scarborough Barber The impetus for Virginia Durr’s Outside the Magic Circle began with a series of interviews in the 1970s. Widely known for her public support of activities to secure voting and other civil rights for fellow southerners who were black, she was sought out by oral historians interested in recording her life story. Wife of Clifford Durr, who had served during the Roosevelt administration as head of the Reconstruction Finance Commission and later of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Virginia began her public activism in Washington in the 1930s, working as a volunteer in the Women’s Division of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). She notes that at the time there was not a single woman from any of the southern states serving on a local or state committee . There were a few ornamental women on the National Committee—pretty women who “wore big hats and sang ‘Dixie’” (101), but absence was the most obvious feature of women’s role in the Democratic Party, particularly in the South. Deciding that the poll tax was one of the major deterrents to women’s voting and participating in politics, the Women’s Division began an active movement to abolish the tax, a strategy that of course led as well to support of greater enfranchisement of black citizens. Durr recalls that when their efforts began to be noticed, Jim Farley, chairman of the DNC, came first to see Dorothy McAllister, head of the Women’s Division, and then went to Roosevelt, demanding that he “shut up these damn women,” who were beginning to cause real trouble with the southern congressional delegations (115). But Virginia Durr was never one to “shut up,” and her involvement in civil rights work would continue throughout her life. 150 Belles, Wives, and Public Lives, Part II: Durr, Boggs, and Barber  151 In Carry Me Home, a study of Birmingham, Alabama, as a climactic site of the civil rights Movement, Diane McWhorter tells a well-researched and yet personal story of a turbulent era of recent southern history that drew in Alabamians of every political stripe. McWhorter’s grandfather, Hobart McWhorter had been a law partner of Clifford Durr’s before his move to Washington and had even been a member of the Durr wedding party. Her grandmother Marjorie Westgate McWhorter, to whom she dedicates the book, had also known Virginia in the Junior League in Birmingham, and both shared a Wellesley background . Diane McWhorter’s descriptions of Virginia Durr are provocatively ambivalent, aggrandizing her in one paragraph as “one of those larger-thanlife figures who seemed marked for destiny, like her late sister’s husband, Hugo Black,” and then, a few sentences later, condescending about her outspokenness. She writes, “Aptly nicknamed Jinksie, Virginia had always been like a belle on phenobarbital. There had been times when Hobart gave his wife the hairy eyeball after Jinksie publicly betrayed some confidence Marjorie had shared about the law firm” (91). McWhorter’s zigzagging tone, in fact, in several respects traces Durr’s own voice in the autobiography, which is by turns formal and straightforward and then, as if to reassert the ever present belle—lest some display of seriousness undercut “charm”—swerves into a mocking and effacing self-depiction. McWhorter ends the paragraph in a style typical of Durr herself, with a judgment and an anecdote that gives and takes away in equal portion—and in language suggesting both Durr’s extraordinary courage and a frivolous understanding of her own courageous action. “The truths that Jinksie blurted out became morally as well as socially embarrassing once she was radicalized by Senator Robert La Follette’s famous civil liberties hearings,” says McWhorter, who then adds, “Shocked by the revelations about how labor organizers were ‘taken care of’ in her hometown of Birmingham, she had telegrammed her father ’s industrialist friends asking them to ‘refute this unwarranted lie.’ The rebuttals , of course, never came” (91–92). Although a “belle on phenobarbital” may seem more apt of Tennessee Williams ’s Blanche DuBois—or even of Watergate’s Martha Mitchell—than of Virginia Durr, the phrase clearly conveys McWhorter’s fascination with Durr’s quixotic manner of extravagant candor—or earnest flamboyance. One must imagine that, when the oral historians came to talk to Durr and husband Clifford , who in the 1950s and 1960s had assisted in the case of Rosa Parks and served as attorney for...

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