That summer, 27-year-old Irene suffered a miscarriage. To cope with the physical and emotional fallout, she traveled to Gloucester, Virginia, to stay for a time with her mother Ethel. On July 16, “she bought a $5 ticket from the ‘colored’ window at a nearby Haye’s Grocery Store and boarded a Greyhound bus to return home to Baltimore,” said Euell A. Dixon for BlackPast.org. She had been feeling unwell and made an appointment with her Baltimore doctor.
Irene took a seat on the bus. Another Black woman with a baby soon sat beside her. “In those days,” reported the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, “the white section of the bus went as far back as there were white passengers.” There were no designated “colored” sections, but an African American rider could not sit across from or next to a white rider. Irene had chosen a seat within the last four rows at the back.
For 25 miles of travel north, Irene and her seatmate rode without trouble. Then, the bus passed into Middlesex County and a white couple got on. With the laws of Virginia behind him, the bus driver told Irene and her seatmate to give up their seats. When the mother moved to comply, Irene stopped her. Irene told reporter Carol in 2000 that she asked that woman in 1944, "Where do you think you're going with that baby in your arms?"
Irene’s “cup of endurance” had run over.
The irate bus driver got back behind the wheel and drove to the Saluda, Va. jail. There, the local sheriff came on board. He said he had a warrant for her arrest and brandished the paper at her. Irene snatched it from him, tore it up, and threw it out the bus window.
When Carol suggested this was brave, Irene replied, “I can't see how anybody in the same circumstances could do otherwise. I didn't do anything wrong. I'd paid for my seat. I was sitting where I was supposed to.”
The sheriff grabbed her arm and Irene responded by kicking him in the groin. "He touched me. That's when I kicked him in a very bad place,” she told Carol. “He hobbled off, and another one came on. He was trying to put his hands on me to get me off. I was going to bite him, but he was dirty, so I clawed him instead. I ripped his shirt. We were both pulling at each other. He said he'd use his nightstick. I said, ‘We'll whip each other.’”
These men eventually dragged Irene off the bus and threw her into a Saluda jail cell. When news reached her, Irene’s mother hurried there to pay the bail of $500 (the equivalent of nearly $9,000 in 2024).
Irene’s trial at the Middlesex Circuit Court on Oct. 18, 1944, would just be the first. Irene pleaded guilty and accepted the $100 fine for resisting arrest. When it came to the $10 fine and the charge of breaking the segregation laws of Virginia, however, she refused.
Her case then went to the Virginia Supreme Court. Joining Spottswood Robinson as Irene’s defense counsel were William H. Hastie and future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Now assisted by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Spottswood made an argument not against the social injustice of segregation, but that the segregation laws themselves violated the freedom of interstate commerce. The Virginia Supreme Court rejected this interpretation; they ruled that Irene had indeed violated segregation laws and she was ordered to pay the $10 fine.
Irene appealed once again, this time to the United States Supreme Court. On March 27, 1946, the Justices heard the arguments. The following June 3, they shared their decision, as penned by Justice Stanley Forman Reed. In it, he lays out the legal difficulties presented by a country with inconsistent segregation laws across the states.
“On appellant's journey, this statute required that she sit in designated seats in Virginia. Changes in seat designation might be made 'at any time' during the journey when 'necessary or proper for the comfort and convenience of passengers.' This occurred in this instance. Upon such change of designation, the statute authorizes the operator of the vehicle to require, as he did here, 'any passenger to change his or her seat as it may be necessary or proper.' An interstate passenger must if necessary repeatedly shift seats while moving in Virginia to meet the seating requirements of the changing passenger group. On arrival at the District of Columbia line, the appellant would have had freedom to occupy any available seat and so to the end of her journey.”
At issue was not only the shifting of seats, but also the varying definitions of “colored” for those designated areas. “In states where separation of races is required in motor vehicles, a method of identification as white or colored must be employed,” the justices’ decision stated. “Any ascertainable Negro blood identifies a person as colored for purposes of separation in some states. In the other states which require the separation of the races in motor carriers, apparently no definition generally applicable or made for the purposes of the statute is given.”
In his concurrence, Justice Felix Frankfurter put it this way: “The imposition upon national systems of transportation of a crazy-quilt of State laws would operate to burden commerce unreasonably, whether such contradictory and confusing State laws concern racial commingling or racial segregation.” In the case of Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Irene Morgan.
While it might have been more satisfying to strike down Jim Crow laws on the grounds of the Fourteenth Amendment’s prohibition of “any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States,” the lawyers knew what they were doing.
Activists of the time recognized the wisdom of the strategy, too. In a June 15, 1946, opinion titled “Property Rights Save Human Rights,” Oklahoma City’s Black Dispatch printed, “Human rights are not worth very much down below the Mason Dixon line. The existence of the Klan and other terroristic organizations down in Dixie attest to this fact, and we suspect the court would have had more difficulty outlawing the decision, based upon the protection of human rights, than it has in bulwarking its position behind the protection of property. Whether we recognize it or not, the naked truth is that this government today and always has place more guarantees behind property than it has behind liberty, emolument, and privilege of the individual.”
Irene was not present for either of the Supreme Court trials. She learned of the U.S. Justices’ verdict by phone. Her little sister recalled in 2000, “We all laughed and said, ‘She won.’ We were so proud of her. It was a big step, not only for Irene but for all black people. And not just for my race, but for the people of America.”
“If something happens to you which is wrong, the best thing to do is have it corrected in the best way you can,” Irene told the Richmond Dispatch in 2002. “The best thing for me to do was go to the Supreme Court.”
The Freedom Rides of 1961, during which organized student activists rode public transportation to challenge segregation law, are well known. The first Freedom Ride, however, happened in 1947 in response to Irene’s victory. The organizers, Bayard Rustin and George Houser, called it the Journey of Reconciliation. The participants had a chant:
“On June the third the high court said,
When you ride interstate Jim Crow is dead.
Get on the bus, sit anyplace,
'Cause Irene Morgan won her case.”
“Both were interracial demonstrations initiated by the Congress of Racial Equality,” reported historians August Meier and Elliott Rudwick in “The First Freedom Ride.” “The Journey of Reconciliation involved only a handful of people, while the Freedom Ride of 1961 engaged hundreds. The Journey of Reconciliation was conducted only in four states of the Upper South, while the Freedom Ride was carried into the heart of the Deep South. But in both cases the purpose and tactics were the same—to test compliance with the Supreme Court decisions on segregation in interstate transportation by using interracial teams to travel on Greyhound and Trailways buses and deliberately violate state segregation laws. ... Not only were there striking similarities between the two events but, as a matter of historical fact, the Journey of Reconciliation was the prototype, the conscious model, for the later Freedom Ride.”
Much as we learned with the case of Recy Taylor, the techniques and paths of communication forged during more modest efforts can become the keys to widespread progress later.
It seems most people’s reaction to learning of Irene Morgan is to wonder why they’ve never heard of her before. “Throughout the Jim Crow era, many African Americans rebelled against segregated seating in public transportation, but their number vastly increased after World War II,” according to sociologist Barry Schwartz in “Collective Forgetting and the Symbolic Power of Oneness: The Strange Apotheosis of Rosa Parks.” “By the mid-1950s, defiance of bus segregation had become common. A host of unrecognized men and women (‘invisible leaders,’ as Bernice Barnett calls them) preceded Rosa Parks.”
Rosa Parks was an experienced and trained activist whose 1955 arrest was an organized action planned by the NAACP to challenge segregation in the courts. Rosa’s efforts are rightfully remembered. Irene, and hundreds like her, were normal people living their lives. Their arrests, however violent, were just the mundane business of segregation that others said they must “wait” to see end. They were simply people who reached a point they could no longer endure.
After the notoriety brought by the Supreme Court decision faded, Irene returned a life that was private yet also impressive. According to Euell A. Dixon for BlackPast.org, Irene’s family relocated to New York City in 1945. After the death of her first husband in 1948, 32-year-old Irene remarried. She and new husband Stanley Kirkaldy ran “house cleaning and child-care businesses in Queens.”
"It never bothered me, not being in front," she told Carol of The Washington Post. "If there's a job to be done, you do it and get it over with and go on to the next thing."
In addition to children Sherwood Jr. and Brenda, Irene had five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. In 1985, at age 68, she earned a bachelor’s degree in communications from St. John’s University, then a master’s degree in urban studies at age 73 from Queens College in 1990. Carol noted, “When Howard University wanted to award her an honorary doctorate, she declined, saying, ‘Oh, no, I didn't earn it.’”
In 2000, Gloucester, Va., celebrated its 350th birthday. To commemorate the occasion, they installed a historical marker at the site of the Hayes Store where Irene boarded the Greyhound bus to go home. The event’s organizer Jann Alexander told The Washington Post, “It’s the most amazing story. She’s a role model for our children and a link to our past. When I think about honoring someone who made such a sacrifice, I get all choked up.” The city also established four scholarships in her name. In 2001, she was awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal by President Bill Clinton.
On August 10, 2007, Irene was at Brenda’s Gloucester home when she died at age 90. Her funeral was held at the local high school. In 2000, Brenda told Carol that her mother “always taught us that if you know you're right, it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks. It's a moral thing. It's something you have to do. She doesn't see herself as a hero. She saw something that had to be done, and she rushed in, like all heroes.”
Sources:
The Washington Post: The Freedom Rider a Nation Nearly Forgot by Carol Morello
Richmond Dispatch: Irene Morgan
Letter from a Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King, Jr.
Justia: Morgan v. Virginia, 328 U.S. 373 (1946)
Collective Forgetting and the Symbolic Power of Oneness: The Strange Apotheosis of Rosa Parks by Barry Schwartz
The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education: The Uncelebrated Grandmother of the Modern Civil Rights Movement
The First Freedom Ride by August Meier and Elliott Rudwick
Wikipedia: Irene Morgan, Morgan V. Virginia, Journey of Reconciliation
Newspapers.com: The Black Dispatch, June 15, 1946; The Afro-American, June 15, 1946
BlackPast.org: Irene Morgan Kirkaldy (1917-2007) by Euell A. Dixon
The Baltimore Story: Living and Learning Racial Justice
The Maryland Bar Journal: Eugenics, Jim Crow & Baltimore’s Best by Garrett Power
Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City by Antero Pietila
Legal Information Institute: Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia