"Virginia Foster Durr was a monumental champion for civil rights. A white southerner who returned to Alabama in 1951 after twenty years in Washington, D.C., she was horrified to revisit the racism of her childhood. In her struggle to understand the South and battle isolation, she wrote hundreds of letters - humorous, sharp, and observant - to her friends up north, among them Eleanor Roosevelt, Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson, Hugo Black, and C. Vann Woodward." "Published on the 100th anniversary of Durr's birth, her letters offer a window onto a society in turmoil, chronicling the events that transformed the South and the nation. Her writing adds a distinctive glimpse into the day-to-day battles for racial justice at a pivotal moment in American history."--Jacket.