The Jack Rabin Collection on
Series II: Southern Activists
Sub-series 3: Clifford and Virginia Durr
Appendix II.3C: Transcript of side A of Audiotape 19
Location: ?the Durrs’ home
Speaker: Clifford Durr
Date: Unknown (probably late 1960s)
Repository: University
Libraries, The
Collections Department, Historical Collections and Labor Archives
Transcriber: Barry Kernfeld
Item number: Audiotape 19
On side A of audiotape 19, Clifford Durr reads from the beginning of his autobiographical manuscript. On side B, not transcribed, he reads from notes on a then upcoming debate before the Forum Club on whether the continuation of the space program is in the national interest.
Durr: Out of deference to well-established Southern convention, I shall start by assuring the reader of my Southernness. I was born in Montgomery, Alabama, which prides itself upon being the first capitol of the Confederacy, the city where the ordinance of succession was adopted and Jefferson Davis took his oath of office as President of what was to be a new and peculiar nation. My father was born in the same city, and my grandfather was born in the same county, at least. It is true that some of my ancestors came from as far away as Georgia and even Virginia, but if any of them ever lived north of the Potomac River, all family records of that shameful event have been destroyed long ago. Family legend has it that several ancestors had passage booked on the Mayflower, but when they found that it was to land in Massachusetts, they decided to wait for a later boat bound for a Southern port. As family legends go, that is about as reliable as any. I should know, because I invented it.
One grandfather, at least, was a slave owner. He or at least his father owned not just a few slaves, but the holdings ran into the hundreds. Both grandparents were captains in the confederate army, and when the Civil War was over, not being willing to face life under Union rule, one grandparent, along with his father and brothers, migrated to Brazil to set up there a way of life more consistent with that which they were used to. But hardly had they become established when Don Pedro II announced that he was freeing the slaves there, so they decided they might as well come back home and put up with the damn Yankees as best they could.
But I will have to admit one dark blot on the family escutcheon. This same grandparent, confederate veteran, the son of a slave owner, who migrated to Brazil, once voted the Republican ticket. This was a skeleton in the family closet during my childhood, but I will have to admit that the neighbors were kind enough not to discuss the shame matter in the presence of us, the grandchildren. The Republican vote quite naturally put an end to all hope of grandpa continuing the law practice, but being a rather ornery individual, he retired quite happily to his farm across the river in Elmore county, which, as will hereafter appear, was quite a break for me.
[end of side A of audiotape 19]