Rest in Peace, Irene Morgan

[BigV]

In the exploration of new territory, there are settlers, pioneers, and scouts. With respect to segregation in this country, the overwhelming majority of us are settlers. There are no more "whites only" lunch counters, drinking fountains or bus seats. And we have the pioneers to thank for showing us it could be done. And we have the scouts to thank who have gone before us to blaze a trail on maps where none existed.

You may know the name of Rosa Parks, and you may think of her as one of these brave intrepid scouts. And brave she was, but a brave pioneer, following the trail wrought by Irene Morgan.

Rosa Parks famously refused to give up her seat on the bus, and we're all better off for that act of courage. But it was Irene Morgan's example she was following, intentionally or otherwise. Morgan also refused to give up her seat to a white person **11 years** before Parks.

Irene Morgan (1917 – August 10, 2007), later known as Irene Morgan Kirkaldy, was an important predecessor to Rosa Parks in the successful fight to overturn segregationist laws in the United States.

Like the more famous Parks, but 11 years earlier, in 1944, the 27-year-old Baltimore-born Morgan was arrested and jailed for refusing to give up her seat on an interstate Greyhound bus to a white person. In July 1944, Morgan was a 27-year-old mother of two, living in Gloucester County, Virginia. She had been ill and one Sunday morning she boarded a Greyhound bus for Baltimore, where she was to see a doctor. She sat down four rows from the back of the bus, in the section for "colored" people. When a white couple needed seats, the driver told Morgan and her seatmate to move farther back. Irene Morgan refused.

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Morgan appealed her case on the conviction for violating the segregation laws and her lawyers appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1946, the justices ruled 6-1 that Virginia's law enforcing segregation on interstate buses was illegal.

Her case, Irene Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia 328 U.S. 373 (1946) was argued by Thurgood Marshall, the chief counsel of the NAACP and later himself an Associate Supreme Court Justice. The action resulted in a landmark ruling in 1946, which struck down state laws requiring segregation in situations involved interstate transportation. Marshall used an innovative strategy to argue the case. Instead of relying upon the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment, Marshall argued successfully that segregation on interstate travel violated the Interstate Commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution.

"If something happens to you which is wrong, the best thing to do is have it corrected in the best way you can", said Morgan. "The best thing for me to do was to go to the Supreme Court."

Irene Morgan Kirkaldy, whose defiance of bus segregation laws -- more than a decade before Rosa Parks' landmark case -- helped lay the foundation for later civil rights victories, died Friday at her home in Hayes, Va. She was 90.

Thank you Irene Morgan for your courage, persistence, and sense of justice. You helped make our nation a better place. I'd gladly yield my seat to you. It would be an honor.