Clifford Durr

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Clifford Durr
Commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission
In office
November 1, 1941 - June 30, 1948
PresidentFranklin D. Roosevelt
Harry S. Truman
Personal details
Born
Clifford Judkins Durr

(1899-03-02)March 2, 1899
Montgomery, Alabama
DiedMay 12, 1975(1975-05-12) (aged 76)
Elmore County, Alabama
Resting placeGreenwood Cemetery, Montgomery, Alabama
Political partyDemocratic
Spouse
Oxford University (B.C.L.
)
OccupationLawyer

Clifford Judkins Durr (March 2, 1899 – May 12, 1975) was an Alabama lawyer who played an important role in defending activists and others accused of disloyalty during the New Deal and McCarthy eras.[1] He also was the lawyer who represented Rosa Parks in her challenge to the constitutionality of the ordinance, due to the infamous segregation of passengers on buses in Montgomery.[1] This is what launched the 1955-1956 Montgomery bus boycott.

Durr was born into a patrician Alabama family.

Virginia Foster, whose sister, Josephine, would be the first wife of Hugo Black.[1]

Early life

Clifford Judkins Durr was born on March 2, 1899, in

third-class honours Bachelor of Civil Law degree after electing to sit for the more challenging examination.[1] In April 1926, Clifford married Virginia Foster Durr in hopes of her being a house wife and great social figure while he became a very successful and influential corporate lawyer. Clifford began his career in law at the Martin, Thompson, Foster, and Turner Law firm located in Birmingham, Alabama.[1]

Government service

Clifford had risen to a full partner in his law firm by 1927.

windfall profits from war preparation efforts.[2]

E. E. Cox, for conflict of interest. Durr campaigned to set aside frequencies for educational programs and to sell them to more diverse applicants, some of whom were attacked for their leftist politics.[2] In 1945, he was appointed the head of an FCC study to determine if radio broadcasters upheld their pledges to provide public service programs to which they found broadcasters were often plagued with excessive advertising and a very little educational programming.[4] The resulting report, the Blue Book defined the guidelines of the FCC's regulatory authority over programming including the requirement of public service programs of local culture, education, and community affairs.[5] Investigations of the FCC by the House Un-American Activities Committee and J. Edgar Hoover's FBI were then initiated in an attempt to find socialist ties.[5]

Representing dissenters

Durr resigned from the FCC in 1948 after dissenting from its adoption of a loyalty oath demanded by the Truman administration.[1] Although Durr did not know it, the FBI had already put him under surveillance in 1942 because he had defended a colleague accused of left-wing political associations.[2] His wife's vigorous support for racial equality and voting rights for blacks and their friendship with Jessica Mitford, a member of the Communist Party, made both of them even more suspect. The FBI stepped up its interest in Durr in 1949, when he joined the National Lawyers Guild.[1] He subsequently became the President of the Guild.

Durr opened a law practice in Washington, D.C. after leaving the FCC. He was one of the few lawyers willing to represent federal employees who had lost their jobs as a result of the loyalty oath program; he took many of their cases without charging them a fee.

Robert Oppenheimer, and several other scientists investigated for disloyalty by HUAC.[2]

Durr and his wife moved to Colorado to work for the

Progressive Party and his own political activities caused him to lose that position as well.[1]

Civil rights work

The Durrs then returned to Montgomery, Alabama in the hope of returning to a more prosperous, less controversial life.

Lyndon Johnson Durr succeeded in discrediting the hearing, but only after nearly coming to blows with a witness in the hearing room. In the process, however, Durr's health and law practice suffered, as Durr lost most of his white clients while the FBI increased its surveillance of him and those around him.[1]

Durr continued to practice in Montgomery as counsel, along with a local attorney

E.D. Nixon, later of the Montgomery Improvement Association, and other black activists decided that hers was not the case to use to challenge the law.[2]

Durr was therefore ready in December, 1955, when police arrested Rosa Parks for refusing to give her seat to a white man.[1] Durr called the jail when authorities refused to tell Nixon what the charges against Parks were and he and his wife accompanied Nixon to the jail when Nixon bailed her out. Nixon and Durr then went to the Parks' home to discuss whether she was prepared to fight the charges against her. Durr and Gray represented Parks in her criminal appeals in state court, while Gray took on the federal court litigation, challenging the constitutionality of the ordinance.[2]

Durr continued to represent activists in the

Civil Rights Movement, supported by financial support from friends and philanthropists outside the South. He eventually closed his firm in 1964.[1] He lectured in the United States and abroad after his retirement. He died at his grandfather's farm in 1975.[1]

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r "Clifford Durr". Encyclopedia of Alabama. Retrieved 2019-10-22.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q Salmond, John A. (1990). The Conscience of a Lawyer: Clifford J. Durr and American Civil Liberties, 1899-1975. Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press. pp. 43–44.
  3. ISBN 978-1572338623
    .
  4. ^ Pickard, Victor (2015). America's Battle for Media Democracy: The Triumph of Corporate Libertarianism and the Future of Media Reform. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. pp. 65–66.
  5. ^ a b Pickard, Victor (2015). America's Battle for Media Democracy: The Triumph of Corporate Libertarianism and the Future of Media Reform. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. pp. 64–66.

Further reading

External links

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