Outside the Magic Circle: The Autobiography of Virginia Foster Durr is a 1985 autobiography of Virginia Foster Durr edited by Hollinger F. Barnard and published by the University of Alabama Press.[1] The book's contents were compiled from interviews taped in the mid 1970s by scholars of oral history.[2] It provides a vivid account of the racism and misogyny of the American South in the first half of the twentieth century, as well as being the personal story of Virginia Foster Durr's life, and its text includes language attributed to others that is now considered inappropriate.[3]
The original 1985 printing of the book was hardback, and it was republished in paperback form in 1990 and as an ebook in 2013.
The social justice education non-profit Facing History and Ourselves includes an unexpurgated excerpt from the book (pages 16-17 of the 1985 hardback edition)[4] as a handout in its Teaching Mockingbird collection.[5]
Durr's significance derived from at least three factors.[6] One was her husband Clifton Durr, who became head of the Federal Communications Commission and later was a leading civil rights lawyer. Another factor was her sister's marriage to Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black. And finally there was her intellect and education. Born into a privileged white family in Alabama in 1903 and attending Wellesley College in Boston for two years (where her own reluctance to sit down to meal with a black woman was confronted and overcome by the headmaster), Virginia eventually endured ostracism and defamation for her support of civil rights. Her interviews produced a vivid account of the paranoia of the McCarthy era and the racism, misogyny and severe economic problems of the South up through the 1960's, as in the following description by Durr of what was said by U.S. Senator "Cotton Ed" Smith of South Carolina during a fight over the poll tax:
[He] talked race all the time ... he would always go on about the sex thing. If anything happened to change the Southern system, the white women would just rush to get a black man. We'd have a race of mulattoes. He and others like him seemed maniacal on the subject of sex ... These men ... would get up and make vile speeches about white women of the South and how they were protecting them. Every black man wanted to rape a white woman and every white woman apparently wanted to be raped ... they showed a kind of sickness...I really think those fears came from the fact that the white men of the South had had so many sexual affairs with black women...It's the only thing I can figure out that made them so crazy on the subject.[1]: 175
^ abCite error: The named reference OfficialBook was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^
"Clifford and Virginia Durr : oral histories". Pennsylvania State University Libraries. Retrieved 2023-11-11.
^"The Birthday Party: Outside the Magic Circle by Virginia Foster Durr". Facing History & Ourselves. 2016-03-14. Retrieved 2023-11-11.
^Reading: The Birthday Party: Outside the Magic Circle by Virginia Foster Durr on Facing History, about how the customs of the Jim Crow South affected her seventh birthday party.
^Collection: Teaching Mockingbird, published Mar. 14, 2016, shows how to incorporate civic education, ethical reflection and historical context into a literary exploration of Harper Lee's novel, To Kill A Mockingbird.
^"Durr, Virginia Foster". Encyclopedia of Alabama. Retrieved 2023-11-11.
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