Reform, Red Scare, and Ruin

About the Book

Virginia Durr of Alabama was a major reformer whose public career spanned almost fifty years. She fought against the Poll Tax and other restrictions of the franchise that stopped millions of whites and blacks from voting, a development favoring only the South’s aristocracy. She became a leader of the Southern Conference on Human Welfare and the Southern Conference Education Fund. Most notably, she directed the National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax. As well, she actively participated in the Civil Rights Movement by working with people like Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mary McLeod Bethune. Because of her reform activism, Durr became a target of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, America’s secret police, and the House Committee on Un-American Activities. She, along with her husband, was hounded by reactionaries from 1938 through the early 1960s. In the United States in the modern era, suppression did not begin with President George Bush; rather, suppression began much earlier; Virginia Durr’s career is a case in point.

About the Author

James Smallwood is Emeritus Professor of History at Oklahoma State University. He has also taught at Texas A&M at Commerce, Southeastern Oklahoma State University, Texas Tech University, the University of Texas at Tyler, Seton Hall University in New Jersey, and the University of Kyoto, Japan. He is the author of sixteen books. His Time of Hope, Time of Despair: Black Texans during Reconstruction won the Texas State Historical Association’s Coral Tullis Award in 1982 for the best book of the year on Texas history. His most recent book, The Indian Texans, won the Texas Library Association’s 2005 Texas Reference Source Award. Smallwood has also edited fourteen books, including ten on the writings of Will Rogers, Oklahoma’s Favorite Son. He is a fellow of both the Texas State Historical Association and the East Texas Historical Association.