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. 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. This is what launched the 1955-1956 Montgomery bus boycott.
Durr was born into a patrician Alabama family. After studying at the University of Alabama, being president of his class, he went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He returned to the United States to study law, then joined a prominent law firm in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1924. In 1926 he married Virginia Foster, whose sister, Josephine, would be the first wife of Hugo Black.
Early life
Clifford Judkins Durr was born on March 2, 1899, in Montgomery, Alabama, to John Wesley Durr and Lucy Judkins Durr. His grandfather, John Weseley Durr, was a business agent for cotton growers, while his other grandfather, James Henry Judkins, was a plantation owner prior to the Civil War. Both his grandfathers served in the Confederate Army during the civil war. Growing up Durr attended Miss Woodruff's Academy and the Starke University School for Boys, a private academy in Montgomery. Durr started his college career at the University of Alabama where his fellow student body elected him President of his class. Later on in college he won the Rhodes scholarship to Queen's College, Oxford University, in England. He graduated from Oxford with a third-class honours Bachelor of Civil Law degree after electing to sit for the more challenging examination. 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.
Government service
Clifford had risen to a full partner in his law firm by 1927. His income was such that he was little affected by the onset of the Great Depression in 1929. As economic conditions worsened, both Clifford and Virginia were becoming more aware of the inequality and injustice which characterized many responses to the collapse. It was this awareness that caused Clifford to unexpectedly leave the firm early in 1933. When members of the junior staff were laid off for financial reasons, Clifford suggested that the more senior members of the firm, including himself, take a pay cut in order to avoid future firings. This suggestion was not supported by the other senior staff. Cliff thus found his continued association with the firm to be untenable. A few weeks after leaving this position, Cliff's brother-in-law, Black, then a Senator, asked him to come to Washington, D.C., to interview for a job with the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the agency charged with recapitalizing banks and trusts. Durr took the job, becoming a dedicated New Dealer in the process. He resigned from that agency in 1941 after a series of disagreements with his superiors over their approval of agreements with defense contractors that allowed them to concentrate their monopoly position and derive windfall profits from war preparation efforts.
President Roosevelt then appointed Durr to the Federal Communications Commission, a politically sensitive position as FDR sought to counter the increasing power and concentration of broadcasters, many of whom were opponents of the New Deal. Durr supported FCC chairman James Lawrence Fly in defending the commission's program of regulation before the House Select Committee to Investigate the FCC, and unsuccessfully petitioned Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn to remove the committee's chairman, 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. 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. 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. 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.