Again we may thank serendipity and my propensity to plunge into the rabbit-holes of opportunity for another post. I came across a collection of oral history interviews in the University of North Carolina’s Documenting the American South while seeking information about UNC economics professor Daniel Houston Buchanan. It was in that collection of primary resources that I stumbled upon the 1975 interviews with the Civil Rights activist Virginia Foster Durr. In her description of her years at Wellesley College, I came across Durr’s positive recollection of economics professor “Muzzy”. That part of her interview was reworked and included in her autobiography seen below. I then decided to track down the professor who ignited her lifelong interest in economic inequality. It would have made my work slightly easier had she or her editor thought about checking the correct spelling of Muzzy. The professor in question turns out to be Henry Raymond Mussey (Columbia Ph.D., 1905).
What we have with this post some indication of the impact made by one economics instructor on the future political life of one of his students. She fought the good fight and Mussey was a positive influence in her personal development.
Bonus Material: What Durr had to say about matters sexual and biblical at Wellesley in the early 1920s has been included along with the account of her economics awakening.
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Virginia Foster Durr
Born August 6, 1903, and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, Virginia Foster Durr was the youngest child of Ann (Patterson) and Sterling Johnson Foster. She attended Wellesley College from 1921 to 1923, when she was forced to withdraw due to lack of funds. In 1926 she married Clifford Judkins Durr. In 1933, when Clifford Judkins Durr was appointed to the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the Durrs moved to Seminary Hill, Virginia; Clifford Judkins Durr later worked for the Federal Communications Commission.
During the years the Durrs lived in Virginia, Virginia Foster Durr led an active social life. Her circle included government officials she knew through Clifford Judkins Durr and through her sister, Josephine, and brother-in-law, Hugo Black, Sr., who was appointed to the United States Supreme Court in 1937. She also devoted time to liberal causes. From 1938 to 1948 Virginia Foster Durr was active in the Southern Conference in Human Welfare, primarily fighting the poll tax. She campaigned for progressive Democrats in 1942 and for the Progressive Party, supporting Henry A. Wallace’s 1948 presidential bid. She also endorsed the American Peace Crusade in 1951.
In 1951, after a brief period in Denver, the Durrs returned to Alabama, where Clifford Judkins Durr opened a private law practice in Montgomery, and Virginia Foster Durr worked as his secretary. In 1954 Virginia Foster Durr and others were accused of being Communists and were called before the Senate Internal Security Sub-Committee, chaired by Senator James Eastland of Mississippi. Although Clifford Judkins Durr did not serve as Virginia Foster Durr’s attorney, he did a great deal of work on the case, collecting information about the informants and providing legal advice to Virginia Foster Durr and her co-defendants. The accusations were ultimately proven to be false.
In 1955, when Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger, Clifford Judkins Durr was called in as her attorney and arranged for her release on bail. This incident sparked the “Montgomery Bus Boycott,” during which African Americans refused to ride on public transportation in the city for over a year. Thus began a second period of civil rights activism for Virginia Foster Durr.
Virginia Foster Durr’s political activities, and Clifford Judkins Durr’s activities with the National Lawyers’ Guild and his public attacks on loyalty oaths and the FBI, led to surveillance by the Bureau.
The Durrs had five children, four of whom survived to adulthood: Ann Durr Lyon, Lucy Durr Hackney, Virginia (“Tilla”) Foster Durr, and Lulah Durr Colan. After the death of Clifford Judkins Durr in 1975, Virginia Foster Durr lived in Wetumpka, Alabama, spending summers on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. Her autobiography, Outside the Magic Circle, was published in 1985. She continued to be politically active until a few years before her death. She died in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1999, at the age of 95.
Source: Biographical note to Papers of Virginia Foster Durr, ca. 1910-2007 in the Schlessinger Library, Radcliffe Institute Collection.
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Sex, Religion, and Economics
The liberations of Virginia Foster Durr at Wellesley College
…Instead of making us think how wonderful it would be to have a baby, we developed a real horror of such a disgusting performance. But that was typical of Wellesley: they would teach you one thing on a scientific basis but never tell you how the baby got into the mother’s stomach. Now, I’m sure there were girls at Wellesley who did know, but not the group I was with. We had been so inhibited by that time that we didn’t want to know. We didn’t discuss things like that. We talked about romance and beaus and lovers and sweethearts but not sex.
I’m sure the Southern girls believed, as I did, that sex was something connected with black people. It happened in the basement and was dirty and ugly and smelled bad, with a man leaving in the middle of the night or early in the morning and Mother getting upset and saying, “She’s had a man down there all night.” Something was ugly and disgusting about it.
We had some excellent teachers at Wellesley. I had a marvelous teacher in economics, Professor Muzzy (sic). He was a socialist, a Fabian. The Russian Revolution had taken place, but I never heard about it. Communism and Russia were far removed from my world. Muzzy was a follower of the Webbs. He read their great massive volumes with the details about how many outhouses there were in a certain road in London and the terrible plight of the poor. There were all kinds of tables and statistics that I had difficulty following. But I did get the impression that the great majority of people in the world had a pretty hard time. Once Muzzy gave me a paper to write. He knew that I came from Birmingham, so he said, “Mrs. Smith is the wife of a steelworker and her husband makes three dollars a day. Now tell me how Mrs. Smith with three children is going to arrange her budget so that she can live.”
Well, I tried to do it. I had to look up the price of food and rent and doctors. It was an active lesson in economics. I soon realized that Mrs. Smith couldn’t possibly live on that amount of money. She just couldn’t do it. When I handed in my paper, I had written at the end, “I’ve come to the conclusion that Mrs. Smith’s husband doesn’t get enough money, because they can’t possibly live on what he is paid as a steelworker in Birmingham, Alabama.” Not that I had ever been in a steel mill or knew anything about it. But Muzzy gave me an A, because he said I had finally realized that people can’t live on what they are paid.
I had another great experience, too. Bible was a required course at Wellesley, but it was taught as history. So I learned that my father had been right about Jonah and the whale. You can’t imagine what that meant to me. I had always felt that Daddy did a very noble act by saying he did not believe the whale swallowed Jonah. He refused to lie and be a hypocrite. But I had always been uneasy that my father had been thrown out of the church for being a heretic as a result of that. It was a great relief to learn that he had been not only noble but also right about the Bible stories as symbolism and myth.
These incidents at Wellesley had a delayed effect, but the main thing I learned was to use my mind and to get pleasure out of it. I also learned I could be comfortable about the Bible, and I could be comfortable that a woman could make a living and be happy even if she didn’t have a husband. And I began to realize that people had a hard time living and didn’t get paid enough. I began to get some inkling of economics. So my Wellesley education was quite liberating. On sex, there was a tremendous breakthrough, although it is hard to realize. I began to kiss Bill Winston and enjoy it thoroughly. Oh, he was so handsome and he used to wrap me in his VMI cape. My goodness, what romance! That was more dangerous than a hammock. So I was liberated to a degree. In sex, religion, and economics in those three in particular—I was liberated at Wellesley.
Source: Virginia Foster Durr and Hollinger F. Barnard. Outside the magic circle: the autobiography of Virginia Foster Durr. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), pp. 62-63.
Image Source: Alabama Department of Archives & History. Alabama Photographs and Pictures Collection. Portrait of Virginia Foster Durr. Colorized by Economics in the Rear-view Mirror.