BALTIMORE (NNPA) – Irene Morgan Kirkaldy, a belatedly-recognized pioneer in the civil disobedience movement, died Aug. 10 at her daughter’s home in Gloucester, Va. She was 90.
”We thank God she had a peaceful passing,” said granddaughter Aleah Bacquie Vaughn. ”When she died, she was holding my mother’s (Brenda Morgan Bacquie) hand.”
More than a decade before Rosa Parks’ definitive act of civil disobedience in 1955, Morgan bucked Jim Crow and, with the help of Thurgood Marshall, took her case to the Supreme Court and won.
On a hot, humid July day in 1944, the 27-year-old widowed mother of two boarded a Greyhound bus in Gloucester, Va., headed north on what was then Route 17, bound for her Baltimore home soon after a miscarriage. She took a seat next to a young mother with an infant, about midway in the ”Colored” section, where she was forced to sit by law. A few miles down the road, Morgan and her seatmate were ordered to get up to make room for a white couple. Morgan said no.
”She was sitting where Negroes at that time were supposed to sit. She paid for her seat. She just thought that wasn’t right and she refused to do it,” said her husband Stanley Kirkaldy.
After Morgan refused to relinquish her seat, the driver directed the bus to the town of Saluda, stopping outside the jail, where a sheriff’s deputy boarded the bus with a warrant for Morgan’s arrest. She ripped it up and threw it out the window.
”When I refused to give up my seat, then they said, ‘We’ll have you arrested.’ Well, I said, `That’s perfectly all right’; but when he put his hands on me, well, then that’s when I kicked him,” said Morgan.
That deputy staggered off the bus and another came on and attempted to put his hands on Morgan, but she fought him also. One account claimed the second deputy threatened to hit Morgan with a nightstick, to which she replied, ”We’ll whip each other.”
Spottswood Robinson, who was later tapped to be one of the lawyers arguing the Brown Supreme Court case in 1954, represented Morgan. He argued that segregation laws were impractical because they impeded interstate commerce. The Middlesex Circuit Court ruled against Morgan, and she was ordered to pay a $10 fine.
However, two NAACP lawyers, William Hastie and Thurgood Marshall appealed the case on her behalf before the Supreme Court in 1946. On June 3, 1946, the Court reached a 6-1 decision that struck down Virginia’s statute on buses traveling from state to state.
A year after the Morgan decision, the ‘”original freedom riders,” eight Wwhite and eight black activists from the newly-formed Congress of Racial Equality, began the two-week ‘Journey of Reconciliation to test the new law.
Hstory books obscured Morgan’s contribution for decades, until her birthplace of Gloucester, Va., honored her during the town’s 350th anniversary in 2001. Then President Bill Clinton also recognized her that year with the Presidential Citizens Medal.
For years, Bacquie Vaughn said, their family shared Thanksgiving dinner with countless uncles – homeless men – whom her grandmother invited, offered them baths, washed and pressed their clothes or gave them new ones. She obtained her bachelor’s degree from St. John’s University at age 68 and her master’s from Queen’s College at 73 – this from a woman who previously had had a third-grade education.
Irene Morgan Kirkaldy is survived by her children, Sherwood Morgan and Brenda Morgan Bacquie; five grandchildren, Aleah Bacquie Vaughn, Shoshanna Bacquie Walden, Janine Bacquie, Deborah Morgan-Barrax and Nechesa Morgan; daughter-in-law Teresa Morgan and son-in-law Gerald Barrax; two sisters, James (Jim) Laforest and Justine Walker; great-grandchildren, other family and friends.