Your intriguing obituary of the day: Virginia Durr
Originally published at Scott Edelman. Please leave any comments there.
As you might have noticed if you’ve visited here before, I enjoy reading obituaries. And not just those of the famous, but also those unlikely to make the front pages.
The obituary for Virginia Durr, which appeared in a recent issue of the Washington Post, was particularly fascinating. Here’s why-
I found it odd for the notice to mention within its first paragraph that Durr died “on the 61 anniversary of the arrest of Rosa Parks.” After all, many people die on the anniversaries of famous events. So I was curious why that particular event would be a fact worth bringing up.
The second paragraph provides an explanation … managing at the same time to make me even more curious.
It turns out that Durr’s parents were the ones who “bailed Rose Parks out of jail after she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus on December 1, 1955.”
Was the date of her death a coincidence? Or something more?
Because apparently, this action by Durr’s parents, who were civil rights organizers, “took a toll” on her, as the obituary put it, and led to her being “shunned,” taken out of school, and sent to a private school “up north.”
Was the date so infused with emotion for Virginia Durr that considering the anniversary this year caused her fatal heart attack? The obituary doesn’t make that connection, and the Internet provides no answer.
But I wonder …