Outside the Magic Circle

Outside the Magic Circle: The Autobiography of Virginia Foster Durr is a 1985 biography of Virginia Foster Durr edited by Hollinger F. Barnard and published by the University of Alabama Press. The book's contents were compiled from interviews taped in the mid 1970s by scholars of oral history. Its language runs free like a spoken conversation, and it is full of anecdotes and descriptions, including language attributed to others that is now considered inappropriate. 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.

Author background

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. Born into a privileged white family in Alabama in 1903 and graduating from Wellesley College, 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.

Themes of the book

Unmarried women's plight in the South

About the importance of her marriage, Durr wrote, "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."

Mid-20th-century Southern racism

The prevailing racism of the South in the mid-twentieth century is vividly captured in this book, 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 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.[[]]

Critical Reception

The publication of the book in 1985 did not go unnoticed. Just a year after its publication, the Georgia Historical Society published a 3-page review critical of the book. The review was written by Lewis. N. Wynne, Executive Director Emeritus of the Florida Historical Society. Wynne compliments the editor's skill in weaving the oral histories into a coherent narrative, but ignores the Terkel introduction and dismisses the importance of Durr's history. Instead, Wynne wrote about "Mrs. Durr's decision to take her children out of the schools in Alabama during the integration struggle and to send them to private schools in the North because the children were unhappy" and her refusal to "let an integrated group of Freedom Riders meet in her house because she felt that they would leave the area and she and her family would have to continue to suffer the abuse that such a meeting would engender." By focusing on what he called Durr's "patrician" background and on what she didn't do instead of what she did do, the review exhibits a condescending and possibly misogynist take on Outside the Magic Circle's value as history.

Positive Reception

Activist Studs Terkel, who wrote an introduction to the book, was enthusiastic about both Virginia Foster Durr's contributions to the civil rights movement and to the book itself. In his own late-life memoir Touch and Go (2007), Terkel summarizes the crux of the book's introduction, as well as the reason for its title:

In the preface, I described the three ways she could have lived her life...I said that since she was part of a white, upper-middle-class society, she could have led an easy life, been a member of a garden or book club, and behaved kindly toward the colored help. Two, if she had imagination and was stuck in this nice, easy world, she could go crazy, as did her schoolmate Zelda Sayre, later the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald. The third is the one she took: She became the rebel girl and basically said, “The whole system is lousy and I’m going to fight it.” That’s stepping outside the magic circle.

Since it's publication, not just the book itself, but the introduction to the book by Studs Terkel, have been cited by many other books about civil rights and about activist women in the U.S. South. Some examples are:

• Sweet Dreams in America: Making Ethics and Spirituality Work by Sharon D. Welch, 2016, cites the Studs Terkel introduction in a footnote at the end of chapter 4.
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