Irene Morgan
| Irene Morgan | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born |
April 9, 1917 Baltimore, Maryland, U.S. |
| Died | August 10, 2007 (aged 90) Gloucester County, Virginia, U.S. |
Irene Amos Morgan (April 9, 1917 – August 10, 2007), later known as Irene Morgan Kirkaldy, was an African-American woman who was arrested in Middlesex County, Virginia, in 1944 for refusing to give up her seat on an interstate bus according to a state law on segregation.
She consulted with attorneys to appeal her conviction. With the help of William H. Hastie, the former governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands and later a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, and Thurgood Marshall, legal counsel of the NAACP, her case, Irene Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia, 328 U.S. 373 (1946), was taken to the United States Supreme Court. In 1946 in a landmark decision, the Court ruled that the Virginia law was unconstitutional, as the Commerce clause protected interstate traffic.
Irene Morgan was born in 1917 in Baltimore, Maryland. She attended local schools and was raised as a Seventh-day Adventist.
Morgan was married twice. She had two children, a son and a daughter, with first husband Sherwood Morgan Sr., who died in 1948. She then married Stanley Kirkaldy, with whom she ran a child-care center in Queens, NY. She received her bachelor's degree from St. John’s University when she was 68 years old. Five years later Morgan earned a master's degree in Urban Studies from Queens College.
In 1944, the 27-year-old Irene Morgan was traveling to Baltimore, Maryland when she was arrested and jailed in Virginia for refusing to sit in a segregated section on an interstate Greyhound bus. Although interstate transportation was supposed to be desegregated, the state enforced segregated seating within its borders.
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