"The Freedom Rider A Nation Almost Forgot"

"Irene Morgan was feeling poorly the muggy July morning when her refusal to bow to bigotry would alter history. Still recovering from a miscarriage, she boarded a crowded Greyhound bus at a crossroads stop in Gloucester, Va., bound for Baltimore. She walked back to the fourth row from the rear, well within the section where segregation laws required black passengers to sit. She picked an aisle seat beside a young mother holding an infant. A few miles up the road, the driver ordered the two black women to stand so a young white couple could take their seats. But Irene Morgan said no, a bold and dangerous act of defiance and dignity in rural Virginia or anywhere in the South of 1944. "I can't see how anybody in the same circumstances could do otherwise," recalled Morgan, brushing off suggestions that she did something brave. "I didn't do anything wrong. I'd paid for my seat. I was sitting where I was supposed to." Eleven years before Rosa Parks refused to cede her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery, Ala., city bus and sparked a new chapter in the civil rights movement, Irene Morgan's spirited and unflinching "No" was a stick of dynamite in a cornerstone of institutionalized segregation. Her arrest and $10 fine were appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court by a young NAACP lawyer named Thurgood Marshall, resulting in a landmark 1946 decision striking down Jim Crow segregation in interstate transportation. She inspired the first Freedom Ride in 1947, when 16 civil rights activists rode buses and trains through the South to test the law enunciated in Morgan v. Virginia."

Article excerpt from
“The Freedom Rider a Nation Nearly Forgot”
by Carol Morello
Published in the Washington Post - 30 July 2000
Found at http://www.citizensmedal.com/IreneMorgan.htm