[2] It provides a vivid account of the racism and misogyny of the American South in the first half of the twentieth century, as well as being the personal story of Virginia Foster Durr's life, and its text includes language attributed to others that is now considered inappropriate.
The social justice education non-profit Facing History and Ourselves includes an unexpurgated excerpt from the book (pages 16–17 of the 1985 hardback edition)[4] as a handout in its Teaching Mockingbird collection.
Born into a privileged white family in Alabama in 1903 and attending Wellesley College in Boston for two years (where her own reluctance to sit down to meal with a black woman was confronted and overcome by the headmaster), Virginia eventually endured ostracism and defamation for her support of civil rights.
Her interviews produced a vivid account of the paranoia of the McCarthy era and the racism, misogyny and severe economic problems of the South up through the 1960s, as in the following description by Durr of what was said by U.S.
Senator "Cotton Ed" Smith of South Carolina during a fight over the poll tax: [He] talked race all the time ... he would always go on about the sex thing.
By focusing on what he called Durr's "patrician" background and on what she didn't do while failing to acknowledge her accomplishments, the review takes a condescending, even hostile approach to the book.