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Excerpt from Oral History Interview with Virginia Foster Durr, February 6, 1991. Interview A-0337. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) See Entire Interview >>

Mary McLeod Bethune as "an African lioness"

In this excerpt, Durr remembers Mary McLeod Bethune as "an African lioness."

Citing this Excerpt

Oral History Interview with Virginia Foster Durr, February 6, 1991. Interview A-0337. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Full Text of the Excerpt

VIRGINIA DURR:
Oh, Mrs. Bethune was just like a great, you know, African lioness. She was a very large, stout woman who had tremendous amount of strength. She's the one that-I was working in the democratic committee, the women's division, and we were all working on getting rid of the poll tax because the women had a hard time voting. You see, the men didn't pay their poll tax, and they didn't have much money. So she said we had to get together with the blacks. So she got us together with people like Charlie Houston and Bill Hastie. Then Jim Farley said we couldn't do it in the democratic committee because it was making the southerners so mad. So we had to get out and do it outside the committee, I mean, fight against the poll tax.