In 1944, alone and recovering from a miscarriage, Irene Morgan boarded a Greyhound bus in Gloucester, VA. She found a seat in the black section of the bus and settled in for the long drive home to Baltimore.
The packed bus stopped in Middlesex County, VA, where a white couple boarded. The driver confronted Morgan and demanded that she vacate her seat. Morgan refused. The bus driver drove to the local sheriff’s station and the sheriff boarded the bus with a warrant for Morgan’s arrest. Morgan tore up the warrant and when the sheriff went to grab her she kicked him and fought every step of the way.
“He put his hand on me to arrest me, so I took my foot and kicked him,” she recalled in You Don’t Have to Ride Jim Crow!, a 1995 public television documentary. “He was blue and purple and turned all colors. I started to bite him, but he looked dirty, so I couldn’t bite him. So all I could do was claw and tear his clothes.”
Morgan’s case went to trial and she was convicted of resisting arrest and violating Jim Crow laws. She paid the $100 fine for resisting arrest but refused to pay the $10 fine for violating the segregation laws. She appealed her case unsuccessfully through the state courts.
She continued her appeals and was eventually granted a writ of certiorari to appeal her conviction to the Supreme Court. Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia was argued before the court by William H. Hastie (1904-1976), the first black man to serve as a governor (Virgin Islands) and as a federal appellate judge (Third Circuit). His co-counsel was Thurgood Marshall (1908-1993).
Hastie and Marshall did not challenge Morgan’s conviction under the expected equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. They did not want to challenge segregation on its face, yet. Instead they argued that because the bus Morgan was riding on was engaged in interstate travel, enforcement of Virginia’s Jim Crow laws violated the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution.
In 1946, two years after Morgan was arrested, the Court issued a 6-1 landmark decision, holding that segregation on vehicles that traveled interstate violated the Commerce Clause.
Morgan’s brave first step, and the South’s refusal to comply with the ruling, gave birth to the Freedom Rider movement, 14 years later.
Morgan eventually married and moved to Long Island. At 68, she earned a B.A. from St. John’s University and followed with a Masters five years later from Queens College. In 2001, President Clinton awarded her a long overdue Presidential Citizens Medal.
She died in 2007, at the age of 90 in Hayes, VA.
