Outside the Magic Circle

Outside the Magic Circle is a biography of Virginia Foster Durr published by the University of Alabama Press in 1985. The book's contents were compiled from interviews taped in the mid 1970's by scholars of oral history. Its language runs free like a spoken conversation, and it is full of anecdotes and descriptions, which may include the now-fully-banned n-word used in quotes of the context in which it was said. It is both a social history of the American South in the first half of the twentieth century and the personal story of Virginia Foster Durr's life. Born into a privileged white family in Alabama in 1903, 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 and severe economic problems of the South up through the 1960's.

Virginia Foster Durr's significance derived from at least three factors. 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. About the importance of her marriage she says, "It was only after I was safely married that I could really be interested in anything... Old maids were pitied not just because they had no husband but because a life without a husband meant a life of poverty."

The prevailing racism of the South is vividly captured in this book, as in the following description of what was said by 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 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."