DURR, Virginia Foster [Rosa Parks].
Outside the Magic Circle: The Autobiography of Virginia Foster Durr.
Alabama: The University of Alabama Press , 1985.
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First Edition of Outside the Magic Circle: The Autobiography of Virginia Foster Durr; Signed by Her and the Mother of the Civil Rights Movement Rosa Parks
First edition of this classic autobiography. Octavo, original cloth. Signed the author and additionally by Civil Rights icon Rosa Parks on the front free endpaper. In July 1955, Durr arranged a scholarship for Rosa Parks to attend an integration workshop at the Highlander Folk School, an experience that inspired Parks to challenge the segregated bus system. After Parks’ arrest, the Durrs and Nixon urged her to file a test case against Montgomery’s segregation policies. Throughout the bus boycott, Virginia Durr remained an avid supporter, highlighting the importance of white involvement in the protest. She later recalled that during the year-long boycott, white women in Montgomery would offer rides to the black women who worked in their homes, but “a vast deceit went on. Everybody knew everybody else was lying, but to save face, they had to lie. The black women had to say they weren’t taking any part in the boycott. The white women had to say that their maids didn’t take any part in the boycott” (Durr, 283). Near fine in a near fine dust jacket. Edited by Hollinger F. Barnard. Foreword by Studs Terkel. Exceptionally rare and desirable signed by these two Civil Rights icons.
Virginia Foster Durr was the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, and she was raised in Birmingham during the early years of this century. She attended Wellesley for two years, until her family’s circumstances made it impossible for her to continue. Virginia’s sister Josephine married Hugo Black; and in 1926 Virginia married a young lawyer named Clifford Durr. The Durrs moved to Washington shortly after Roosevelt’s inauguration, and Clifford was one of the “bright young lawyers” whom the new president relied upon to draft the legislation establishing the New Deal. After World War II the Durrs moved to Denver, then to Montgomery, where Clifford became one of the few white lawyers to represent blacks in civil rights cases. During the Durrs’ Washington years Virginia had been active in the movement to abolish the poll tax and in to her liberal causes; and back in Montgomery, she shared Clifford’s commitment to the civil rights movement and served as an inspiration to liberals of both races.
Virginia Durr has succeeded in articulating the pleasures and the difficulties of growing up female in the vigorous young city of Birmingham; the broadening (and in some ways also restricting) of young women’s intellectual horizons and social life at Wellesley; and the excitement of the courtship and marriage of a proper young Southern girl of good family and poor circumstance. She brings to life the social and political climate of Washington during the New Deal and war years, where her close connection to Justice Black gave the Durrs access to people whom they might not have come to know otherwise. A victim of McCarthyism, Clifford returned with Virginia to Montgomery with no job and few prospects. Their decision to become engaged in the civil rights struggle was consistent with their lifelong commitment to follow their consciences, regardless of the social and economic consequences.
Outside the Magic Circle: The Autobiography of Virginia Foster Durr.
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