Irene Morgan Kirkaldy, whose defiance of bus segregation laws -- more than a decade before Rosa Parks' landmark case -- helped lay the foundation for later civil rights victories, died Friday at her home in Hayes, Va. She was 90.
The cause was complications of Alzheimer's disease, according to her granddaughter Aleah Bacquie Vaughn.
On a hot July morning in 1944, Kirkaldy, who was then known as Morgan, was riding a crowded Greyhound bus from Hayes to Baltimore when a white couple boarded and the driver demanded her seat. The mother of two, who helped build B-26 bombers at a plant in Baltimore, refused.
She had no overarching agenda to challenge the entrenched racism of the era and no intention of picking a fight. If she had, she would not have taken a seat at the rear of the bus, in accordance with Jim Crow laws.
Morgan refused because she had paid for her seat and she wasn't feeling well, having recently suffered a miscarriage.
"I can't see how anybody in the same circumstances could do otherwise," she told the Washington Post years later. "I didn't do anything wrong. I'd paid for my seat. I was sitting where I was supposed to."
Her rebellion led to her arrest and eventually to the U.S. Supreme Court, which decided in her favor June 3, 1946, when, in Morgan vs. Virginia, it declared interstate bus segregation unconstitutional.
The Parks case involved intrastate bus travel and attracted far more public attention, in part because of the bus boycotts that followed in its wake and the eloquent advocacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
But "if you know the name Rosa Parks, you need to know the name Irene Morgan," said Robin Washington, an editor at the Duluth News Tribune who produced an award-winning 1995 documentary about the freedom riders called "You Don't Have to Ride Jim Crow!"
"She did everything that Rosa Parks did, with very little knowledge that anyone would come to her aid. Irene Morgan was simply doing what she thought was right," Washington said.
Her case inspired the first formal "freedom ride" in 1947, when an interracial group led by civil rights leader Bayard Rustin traveled by bus and train from Washington, D.C., to Louisville, Ky., to challenge Southern states to implement the Supreme Court's decision in the case. Their actions in turn set the mold for the famous rides across the South during the spring and summer of 1961, which helped awaken the nation to racial injustice.
