One of the first stories on civil rights pioneer Irene Morgan of Gloucester appeared in the Southside Sentinel on January 16, 1992. That story is reprinted below to celebrate Black History Month.
by Tom Chillemi –
One of the most important challenges to segregation happened in Middlesex County on a hot July day in 1944. On that afternoon in Saluda, a 26-year-old black woman, Irene Morgan, tested Virginia’s segregation law when she refused to move and give her bus seat to a white person.
In doing so Morgan stood up to a Virginia law that would be declared unconstitutional two years later by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The law in Virginia and several other states in the mid-1940s was that blacks were to sit only in the back of the bus. In July 1944, Morgan was traveling on a bus going from Norfolk to Baltimore, Maryland. When the bus stopped at Saluda, Morgan and her two children were told to give up their seats to whites. She refused and was arrested and jailed for a short time in Saluda.
Her case, however, was later heard by the U.S. Supreme Court and it ruled that Virginia’s segregation law could not apply to interstate passengers on commercial motor vehicles. It was a victory for Morgan and all African Americans.
Morgan’s little-known crusade predated by 11 years Rosa Parks’ more famous yet similar action in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955.
In her words
The following account of Morgan’s ordeal was gathered by Southside Sentinel reporter Tom Chillemi in 1992 from court records at the Middlesex Courthouse and from his interview of the late Irene Kirkaldy, the former Mrs. Morgan, who was living in New York at the time.
Morgan and her two children had boarded a Greyhound Bus at Hayes store in lower Gloucester, near Guinea. They were bound for her home in Baltimore.
About 30 minutes into the trip, a white couple got on the crowded bus and the driver told Morgan and her children to move further to the rear, or the “colored” section of the bus. Morgan refused to budge.
She had been sitting in the fifth row of seats behind the driver as required by state law. However, under the same law, the driver of the bus had a duty to move blacks further back in the bus to accommodate additional white passengers.
When a black woman with a baby who was sitting beside Morgan began to move in response to the driver’s orders, Morgan stopped her.
Threats by the driver to have Morgan arrested did nothing to soften her iron will, now strengthened by anger. “I was so angry . . . I told him that [to be arrested] would be perfectly alright,” said Morgan in the 1992 interview, recalling that day in 1944.
Arrested
The bus driver pulled into a “filling station” in Saluda and filed a complaint with Middlesex County Sheriff R. Beverly Segar. The sheriff, enforcing the law of the state, then boarded the bus to arrest Morgan. Segar, who served as Middlesex County Sheriff for 47 years beginning in 1904, probably wasn’t ready for the fury awaiting him. When shown the arrest warrant for her, Morgan defiantly asked Segar if he even knew her name.
“I ripped the paper up and threw it out the window,” she said. “When he put his hands on me, I kicked him.”
Court records from the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals indicate the feisty woman actually kicked Sheriff Segar three times, leading to a charge of resisting arrest.
The sheriff left the bus and minutes later a deputy boarded to arrest Morgan. He also got a taste of the temper of the 5’7” Morgan. “I had to get on suitcases to get a piece of him,” she said.
The deputy allegedly said words to the effect, “When I get you inside . . . ,” she said. “I didn’t worry, I was furious.”
Morgan was forcibly taken to the Middlesex county jail and charged with “refusing to move to the back of the Greyhound bus in the section for colored people” and with resisting arrest.
When persons came to her jail window she told them to get Rev. [B.H.] Gayle, who in turn contacted Morgan’s mother, Ethel Amos in Gloucester. Mrs. Amos posted Morgan’s $500 bond.
Ironically, Morgan, who came to Virginia “to relax” following serious surgery, wasn’t recovering too well and was returning to Baltimore to the hospital at the very time of her arrest. “It was a very ugly experience,” she said.
Two-year battle
Once she was free, Morgan contacted the NAACP, which sent Attorney Spotswood Robinson III to her defense.
She was convicted in Middlesex General District Court by Judge Catsby G. Jones for violating the state statute requiring segregation of the races on all public vehicles.
She was fined $10 for the misdemeanor plus $5.25 and court costs. (See accompanying court document).
She was also fined $100 for resisting arrest. Lewis Jones Jr. of Urbanna was the Middlesex Commonwealth’s Attorney at the time.
Appeal
In October 1944, Morgan’s case was appealed in Middlesex County Circuit Court but the earlier ruling by the Middlesex General District Court was upheld.
Early in 1945, NAACP attorneys carried their appeal to the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals, which upheld the state law and earlier rulings.
However, in September 1946, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Virginia law mandating segregation on public transportation vehicles could not apply to interstate passengers for motor vehicles engaged in such traffic. “The ruling was such that it lent itself to application of railroads and airplanes,” states the Negro Almanac.
In the 1992 Southside Sentinel story, Chillemi spoke with Middlesex resident Robert Brown. He said that Morgan’s case, like the Rosa Parks case a decade later in Alabama, “blazed a wide path to civil rights movements of the 50s and 60s and set a precedent for protest.”
The U.S. Supreme Court ruling led to the “freedom riders” who rode interstate buses into southern states starting in 1961 to bring light to the fact segregation was still being enforced with regard to transportation and in other places.
President Bill Clinton presented Mrs. Kirkaldy (Irene Morgan) the Medal of Freedom, which is the highest civilian honor.
