Well, first, we have to be more specific. There are at least five Leon Dures in a line that branched out from Macon, Ga., to parts of the world not yet determined.
But in this case, I’m talking about Leon Dure Jr., who led a fascinating life. He graduated from the University of Georgia, and by his own admission, that might have been generous. He was not the most dedicated of students. He was, though, a dedicated reader, and that undoubtedly served him well as a journalist and his distinguished service in WWII, about which I know only that it involved some sort of intelligence work and the unfortunate acquisition of some chronic gastrointestinal issues. I regret that I know so little about the former, but I know all I need to know about the latter.
He retired from journalism to become a gentleman farmer, seeing himself as a latter-day Thomas Jefferson, equally adept at raising crops and writing influential letters and articles from the rolling landscape around Charlottesville.
Unfortunately, the cause for which he’s best known was, like the cause of many of his ancestors, regarded today as being on the wrong side of history. That cause was school segregation.
No, Leon Dure Jr. wasn’t one of the lowlife scumbags who assaulted the Freedom Riders. He was far more erudite than that. But he was also more complex. He wasn’t a cartoon villain like Steve Bannon or a Fox Infotainment Channel anchor. He would’ve been appalled by the rally in Charlottesville where people chanted “Jews will not replace us” and Heather Heyer died, and he surely would’ve had no patience with any cult-leader politicians who said there were “fine people” on “both sides.”
A well-written biography at Encyclopedia Virginia captures an intellectual life that doesn’t fit neatly in one box. While still in Georgia at the Macon Telegraph, he led the way to give Black people courtesy titles such as “Mr.” and “Miss,” a symbolic but important sign of respect. He also told North Carolina colleges that they would accept a female sportswriter, the legendary Mary Garber, whether they liked it or not.
On the other hand, there’s no denying that he wrote letters and journal articles suggesting a way for white parents to ensure that their kids never had to associate with Black kids. He used a clever argument — if the Constitution granted us a freedom of association, it must also have granted us the freedom not to associate.
You may have guessed by now why I have such an interest here. Leon Dure Jr. was my grandfather. You’ll also find Leon Dure III and Leon Dure IV in scholarly journals, but they’re scientists, and I’d need considerable help deciphering their work or any work that cites them. I was once interested in being an engineer, but I never had any desire to be a biochemist or neurologist. I’m a journalist like my grandfather. Like many inherited maladies, journalism apparently skips generations.
And there are other strands woven together in this web of Southern political trivia. The school that was told to accommodate Mary Garber in its pressbox was Duke, which happens to be my alma mater. And Duke appears in this story again because some historians have accused a Duke professor, Nancy MacLean, of neglecting my grandfather’s work in her book Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America.
I have no desire to wade into an academic argument over James Buchanan — not the president accused of bungling pre-Civil War tensions but a Nobel laureate accused of being too sympathetic to segregationists. That argument is being contested mostly by members of libertarian-leaning think tanks, and like my favorite band Rush, I outgrew libertarianism in my young adulthood. Maybe I’d have more sympathy to libertarians if Reason magazine and its commenters would put up a more forceful resistance to the least libertarian president in American history, Donald Trump, but alas, I’ve found all too many people in my life who reach for Atlas Shrugged as cover for their unwillingness to admit that a lot of people in this world suffer misfortunes that are not of their own doing, and any sensible form of morality would say we should help such people directly rather than misreading Adam Smith and thinking “the invisible hand” will lift them all. While I was at Duke, the libertarians were the ones who wanted to defend their right to urinate out their dorm windows.
Where was I? Oh, right …
Despite my inclination to believe a Duke professor over a gaggle of people funded by the Koch family (speaking of people who’ve put up a comically ineffectual resistant to forces bent on stripping away our liberties, thereby showing their true colors), I’m indebted to Phillip Magness, Art Carden and Vincent Geloso for reporting something I did not know — my grandfather’s work was seen as too accommodating by the hardcore segregationists of the day:
Shortly after the initial publication of his tuition grant plan in January 1958, Dure began receiving anonymous personal threats by mail on a regular basis, including pieces intimating they originated from the Ku Klux Klan.
Imagine if they’d known he gave courtesy titles to Black people in Macon!
Magness took the debate to a blog post on Democracy in Chains by Ben Alpers, and my grandfather’s name was invoked once again. The context would take a while to explain, but I believe Magness is attempting to claim that people like Buchanan who shared my grandfather’s views on school choice weren’t really mean old segregationists.
Alpers responds by re-establishing the context that a paper by Nutter and Buchanan (A) directly challenges the Brown vs. Board of Education decision and (B) draws upon my grandfather’s clever argument:
First, it states as axiomatic that substantive education decisions should rest entirely with state and local governments. This, in effect, assumes the illegitimacy of Brown. Just as crucially, it presents as the attractive “middle option” between the wholly public and wholly private extremes “the plan associated in Virginia with Mr. Leon Dure.” Dure, a prominent journalist, was the creator and chief advocate of “freedom of choice of association” as a way that the South could successfully resist federal demands to integrate schools. (Alpers then links to Encyclopedia Virginia.) So, in short, despite not discussing race (much) directly, Nutter and Buchanan’s paper is an argument for what was, in 1959, the cutting-edge segregationist position in Virginia state educational debates.
My grandfather died when I was in my early 20s. I can’t say I had the opportunity to have many meaningful conversations with him, sadly. He was tickled that I went into newspaper journalism as he did. He thought news should be based in objectivity, which I still generally uphold as well. At the same time, he thought I needed to write something about the greatness of Margaret Thatcher, to which I just nodded politely and changed the subject to the putting greens at his retirement complex in Florida.
(I found another paper I need to read now.)
But there’s no surprise here. Alpers is right. Whether my grandfather or Buchanan ever expressed any outright prejudice is irrelevant. The system they wanted to instill was not good for Black people, and it was naive to ever believe otherwise.
My grandfather wasn’t one to bear animosity. The Klan guessed correctly that he wasn’t one of them. I believe he genuinely believed that his plan was the best for everyone involved, including Black people. But that belief is rooted in what we might call “white privilege” today, though I’m wary of that term.
Magness responded to Alpers:
The particulars of the 1959 paper are certainly interesting and certainly open to criticism. For example, I suspect it is more a case of naivety with what Dure was up to, or more broadly a case of underestimating the depth of the problem with the segregationists, than the more malicious motives depicted by MacLean.
My guess is the opposite. Granddad was probably a bit naive about the effects of his school choice plan on Black people, not fully recognizing that “separate but equal” doesn’t work in practice. People who are closer to the halls of political power are typically less naive. As we see today, they may not share the racism of the rabble, but they’re more than happy to exploit it. Granddad would’ve been horrified to see that.
This tangled web has another ironic thread. Throughout the South, there was an explosion of private schools as public schools were desegregated. My school, Athens Academy, came into being during that time. I have no desire to slander its founders, though, and I can report that less than two decades after it was founded, my school had far more diversity of thought and diversity in its student body than a lot of the “Christian” indoctrination chambers that dot the Georgia landscape. These days, all the more so. Whether any founders harbored ill intent isn’t something we can discern. The ones I met all had good hearts. Most important, the school puts forth a few dozen well-educated kids each year.
Today, I devote a lot of my working life to schools. I’ve been in schools that are predominantly wealthy — not necessarily white, because we have a lot of international families — and in less homogeneous schools that are full of first-generation Americans whose primary at-home language is not English. I think the students who race up to give me a hug before plowing through their schoolwork prove that Granddad’s concerns about “not associating” were overblown. But I’d like to think he’d be happy to hear that. It’s nice to be wrong every once in a while.
