Imagine sitting in a bus and being told to stand because you have the wrong skin color and someone with the correct skin color wants your seat. That's the way it was in Idiot America.

Wall Street Journal

OPINION
COMMENTARY

The Road That Led to Rosa Parks

Irene Morgan, 27, kept her seat on a Greyhound bus in 1944. She went all the way to the Supreme Court.

By Thomas M. Boyd

February 3, 2020

Saluda, Virginia

You’ve heard of Rosa Parks, but you probably don’t know the name Irene Morgan. On July 16, 1944, Mrs. Morgan, 27, boarded a Greyhound bus at Hayes Store in Gloucester County, Va. She had been visiting her mother and was returning to Baltimore. The bus had few passengers when she got on, but 25 miles later, when it arrived in Saluda, a long line of people were waiting to board. As they filled seats, the driver asked Morgan to relinquish hers to a white passenger.

She refused, and the sheriff was summoned. “He put his hand on me to arrest me,” she recalled later, “so I took my foot and kicked him. 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.”

She was arrested, jailed and charged with resisting arrest and refusing to obey a Virginia law that required racially segregated seating on public transportation. When she appeared in the Middlesex County courthouse in Saluda, she paid the $100 fine for resisting arrest but refused to pay the $10 fine for refusing to give up her seat.

The NAACP took up her case, and Morgan v. Virginia made its way to the Supreme Court, where Thurgood Marshall represented her. On June 3, 1946, the justices ruled 7-1 in her favor. “It seems to us,” Justice Stanley Reed wrote, “that seating arrangements for the different races in interstate motor travel require a single, uniform rule to promote and protect national travel.” The older rationale had been that if Congress was silent on the issue, as it had been, the 10th Amendment left the question to the states. It was another decade before the court held, in Browder v. Gayle, that segregated intrastate buses violate the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.

This past Saturday, under a soft drizzle, a sizable crowd gathered under tents near where the Hayes Store once stood. Among them were more than 50 of Irene Morgan’s descendants. They were there for the unveiling of a historic marker to commemorate her spontaneous, singular act of courage.

Across the street stood another Virginia historical marker. It commemorates the 1781 Battle of the Hook, in which a renowned British cavalry commander, Col. Banastre Tarleton, failed to open the way for a British escape from nearby Yorktown. Tarleton’s defeat helped lead to the surrender of Lord Cornwallis’s British army to Gen. George Washington, ending the Revolutionary War.

The Battle of the Hook isn’t as well-known as it should be. Neither is Irene Morgan, who died in 2007 and who waged one of the first successful skirmishes in an equally important American revolution.

Mr. Boyd is a former Assistant Attorney General, appointed by President Ronald Reagan.