HISTORY: Irene Morgan

A young Irene Morgan

Eleven years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, a young woman named Irene Morgan rejected that same demand on an interstate bus headed to Maryland from Gloucester, Virginia. Recovering from a miscarriage and already sitting far in the back, she defied the driver's order to surrender her seat to a white couple. Like Parks, Morgan was arrested and jailed. But her action caught the attention of lawyers from the NAACP, led by Thurgood Marshall, and in two years her case reached the Supreme Court.
Though the lawyers fervently believed that Jim Crow - the curious pseudonym for racial segregation - was unjust, they recognized the practice was still the law of the land, upheld by the 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. Instead of seeking a judgment on humanitarian grounds or the equal protection provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment, they made the seemingly arcane argument that segregation in interstate travel violated the Constitution's Interstate Commerce Clause.

On June 3, 1946, that strategy paid off. In Irene Morgan v. Virginia, the court ruled that segregation in interstate travel was indeed unconstitutional as "an undue burden on commerce." But though that the decision was now law, the southern states refused to enforce it, and Jim Crow continued as the way of life in the South. Yet there were those determined to do something about it.
In the spring of 1946, Irene Morgan, a black woman, boarded a bus in Virginia to go to Baltimore, Maryland. She was ordered to sit in the back of the bus, as Virginia state law required. She objected, saying that since the bus was an interstate bus, the Virginia law did not apply. Morgan was arrested and fined ten dollars. Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP took on the case. They argued that since an 1877 Supreme Court decision ruled that it was illegal for a state to forbid segregation, then it was likewise illegal for a state to require it. The United States Supreme Court agreed:

"As no state law can reach beyond its own border nor bar transportation of passengers across its boundaries, diverse seating requirements for the races in interstate journeys result. As there is no federal act dealing with the separation of races in interstate transportation, we must decide the validity of this Virginia statute on the challenge that it interferes with commerce, as a matter of balance between the exercise of the local police power and the need for national uniformity in the regulations for interstate travel. It seems clear to us that seating arrangements for the different races in interstate motor travel require a single, uniform rule to promote and protect national travel. Consequently, we hold the Virginia statute in controversy invalid."

The court did not rule that segregated transportation within the state was unconstitutional. The ruling, while another defeat for segregation in law, did not have an immediate impact. Buses still segregated its passengers until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s put an end to the practice once and for all.