Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, March 28, 1992 TAG: 9203280051
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PATRICK K. LACKEY LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
It was shortly past noon on Sunday, July 16, 1944. The bus was near the Middle Neck Peninsula village of Saluda when a white couple boarded and the driver ordered Irene Morgan, a slender black woman recovering from surgery for a tubal pregnancy, to give up her seat.
Morgan told the driver she was legally seated, five rows back. She would not move.
Back then, black and white riders in the South were separated by law and by terror.
In 1942, a black Army private was arrested in Texas and shot twice by a patrolman for sitting in a bus seat reserved for whites. Two years later, a bus driver shot and killed a black serviceman for refusing to move to the rear of the bus. And in 1945, three black Women's Army Corps members were beaten by police in Elizabethtown, Ky., for moving slowly from the white to the black waiting room at a bus station.
Still, Morgan would not budge. The driver pulled into Saluda, the Middlesex County seat, and filed a complaint. Sheriff Beverly Segar, who had held the job since 1904, came aboard bearing a warrant for Morgan's arrest.
He testified later that she kicked him three times in the legs.
Not true, she said in a recent interview in Baltimore County, where the 74-year-old lives with and cares for a critically ill sister.
"It was very painful," she said. "[I kicked him] in the groin."
Her arrest began a landmark civil-rights case in which a $10 fine for violating a Virginia segregation statute was appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Two years later that court held in the Morgan case that racial segregation in interstate transportation was unconstitutional.
Morgan, whose grandmother was a slave till age 6, had won for herself and for blacks nationwide the legal right to sit wherever they pleased on buses and trains that crossed state lines.
That was 11 years before Rosa Parks' refusal to relinquish her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Ala., sparked mass protests in Montgomery and energized the civil-rights movement throughout the South. Before her time and TV
Although legal giants of the civil-rights movement like Thurgood Marshall and Spottswood W. Robinson III consider her a heroine, Irene Morgan has never been called on to speak at special civil-rights occasions, as Rosa Parks often is. History has taken notice of the case but largely ignored the person.
"Every time I make a speech and talk about these civil-rights cases," said Oliver Hill, an 84-year-old Richmond lawyer, "I always mention Irene Morgan. Generally the public, white or black, doesn't know anything about her."
Probably the main reason for Morgan's obscurity is that she was ahead of her time.
Media coverage was brief. There was no television to show a 5-foot-5-inch, 26-year-old woman hauled off to jail. The nation's attention was on World War II.
In addition, Morgan is a private, reserved woman who never sought acclaim. "It was such a normal thing to do," she said in an interview in Baltimore. "I feel it was what any person would have done."
Some historians were thrown off her track when she remarried and changed her last name to Kirkaldy. And finally, the case was not seen by Southern whites as a devastating frontal attack on segregation.
The U.S. Supreme Court held not that Irene Morgan's civil rights had been violated but that racial segregation in interstate travel put an "undue burden on transportation."
Two days after that opinion was issued, The Virginian-Pilot editorialized:
"The desegregation here ordered does not invade that hard core of racial separation, embedded in Southern custom and law, which Southern majority opinion holds to be essential to the region's peace and which the majority opinion of the South will determinedly defend against dilution."
The 1961 Freedom Ride - where black and white civil-rights activists rode together on buses through the Deep South - was an effort to force final implementation of the Morgan decision 15 years after the ruling, said Wyatt Walker, a onetime Petersburg minister whom Martin Luther King Jr. recruited to be his chief administrator.
"If there had not been the Irene Morgan case," Walker said, "there might not have been a Freedom Ride." Out of character
Irene Morgan is not normally a combative woman.
Spottswood Robinson a Richmond lawyer and federal judge who has known her 48 years, ever since he defended her for kicking the sheriff, described her as "reserved," a word she used to describe herself.
Her granddaughter, Aleah Bacquie, agreed but added, "To me, she is a revolutionary" who was talking about racial injustice when few were.
"She always instilled in her children that you have to fight what's wrong," Bacquie said. "When I was going to school, she said, `You don't pledge allegiance to the flag unless you know the things you say are true. Is there liberty and justice for all? If there isn't, why are you pledging allegiance to it?':"
"Fairness and justice were always an issue" at Morgan's house, said Bacquie.
She ran a successful building-maintenance company in New York and later owned a successful day-care center on Long Island before she retired to return to school. She earned an undergraduate degree in communications from St. John's University in 1983 and a master's degree in urban studies from Queens College in New York in 1990.
She put off plans to pursue her doctorate to care for her sick sister, Jessie Gregory.
Morgan, the sixth of 10 children, seems much younger than 74. Time has not yet gotten up the nerve to wrinkle her skin, and her mind is quick.
Her maternal ancestors, she said, were slaves on the Tabb Plantation in Gloucester County.
In the summer of 1944, she was married to a maritime electrician named Sherwood Morgan. They had two children, ages 2 and 4.
After an operation in Baltimore for a tubal pregnancy, she had gone to Gloucester County with the children to recuperate under the care of her mother, Ethel Amos. Medical complications forced her early return to the hospital in Baltimore. She left the children with her mother.
She had ridden the bus only about 15 minutes, she said, when the white couple boarded.
"At the time, you had to sit the fifth seat back from the front," Morgan said. "You always made certain that you sat in the proper places. I was sitting the fifth seat back."
Bus drivers, then, had police powers to enforce segregation laws.
The Greyhound driver ordered Morgan to give up her seat to the white woman, because no seats were vacant farther to the front.
As she recalled the confrontation, she told the driver, "I refuse to stand. This is my seat. Why should I?"
Then he said, "Well, I'm going to have you arrested."
Whereupon she said, "That's OK; I don't mind."
"So when we got to Saluda," Morgan recalled, "one sheriff came on. He said, `I have a warrant for your arrest.' And I said, `A warrant for whom?' He didn't know my name. I said, `A warrant for what offense?' I was legally in my right seating position."
The sheriff handed her the warrant, she said, and she tossed it out the window.
Morgan said she told the sheriff she was willing to be arrested, but he grabbed her by one arm.
"When he came and put his hands on me," she said, " . . . that was it. He should never have put his hands on me."
The sheriff doubled over from the kicks and left the bus, Morgan said. A deputy boarded and took her to jail. Her mother was notified and posted bail. Guilty as charged
Two days later, a justice of the peace sentenced Irene Morgan to 30 days in jail for resisting arrest and fined her $10 for violating the state segregation statute.
She posted bond and appealed. Through the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's chapter in Baltimore, she was put in contact with 28-year-old Richmond lawyer Spottswood Robinson. He had broken all academic records at the Howard Law School, then the legal heart of the civil rights movement.
Robinson remembers well their first meeting. "She thought she was right," he said. "I thought she was right."
The trial was held in the Saluda courthouse Oct. 18, 1944, before Middlesex Circuit Court Judge Douglas Mitchell.
"The first thing I remember I saw was a charter for the Ku Klux Klan on the wall there in the courthouse," Morgan said, "so I didn't have a good feeling that day."
The courtroom, which seats about 130 spectators, was packed for the trial with whites and blacks. One black spectator was Easter Holmes, who still lives nearby. She was 33.
Holmes recalled how blacks hated racial segregation on buses and trains.
"That was the way they were trying to indoctrinate us," she said, "to try to make us feel inferior another way."
Morgan was convicted on both charges and fined $100 for resisting arrest and $10 for violating the segregation statute.
She appealed the latter charge. About a year later the state's highest court, then the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals, upheld her conviction.
The key question was not whether Irene Morgan had violated a law but whether the statute, itself, was legal. Robinson argued that it placed an undue burden on commerce and hence violated the United States Constitution.
The state court, in a unanimous opinion, held that whites and blacks had separate but equal seats and that the separation of the races was a legitimate exercise of state police power to avoid friction between the races.
The opinion stated that the statute placed no undue burden on commerce and applied to local and interstate buses.
Next came the U.S. Supreme Court hearing. Because Robinson was six months shy in experience from qualifying to appear before that court, his friends Thurgood Marshall, later a U.S. Supreme Court Justice, and William Hastie, then dean of the Howard Law School, argued the case. Ten years later Robinson would be one of the lawyers to successfully argue the landmark school desegregation case, Brown vs. Board of Education.
The U.S. Supreme Court decision in the Morgan case, dated June 3, 1946, noted that 18 states prohibited racial segregation on public carriers while 10 states, all in the South, required it.
The majority opinion indicated that "a burden may arise" because different state statutes might force interstate passengers to have to move according to local, rather than national, requirements. In ruling the Virginia statute invalid, the opinion concluded that "a single uniform rule" was called for.
Soon the opinion was applied to trains. Segregation began a slow retreat.
In the late 1950s, inter- and intrastate buses in the northern tiers of Southern states gradually and quietly ended segregation, but the Deep South fought on.
Some of the 1961 Freedom Riders were killed. Later that year, the Interstate Commerce Commission and the U.S. Justice Department began protecting the civil rights of black travelers.
In November 1990, Morgan visited Robinson, her attorney, who by then was a senior judge with the U.S. Court of Appeals for Washington, D.C.
He phoned then-U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and said, "I have got somebody over here you have never met, but it's a former client."
Robinson recalled Marshall saying, "It must be Irene Morgan."
In an interview at his home in Richmond, Robinson paid tribute to Morgan and all the others, most forgotten, who stood up for their civil rights:
"They say, `Now wait, I have had enough and I am going to stick to what I think are my rights.'
"What endows them with the courage? It usually takes an enormous amount of courage, the strength of conviction, not to get in that long seat in the back of the bus.
"They say, `That's just not right.':"
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