Irene Morgan Kirkaldy, Rest in Peace

Irene Morgan Kirkaldy passed away last week at the age of 90. Back in 1944 the then-Irene Morgan challenged segregated seating on a bus traveling between Gloucester, Virginia and her home in Baltimore. She was arrested and convicted of violating the state's Jim Crow laws but she challenged her conviction in court. Eventually the Supreme Court ruled in her favor in the case Morgan v. Virginia in 1946, which established (in the realm of Constitutional law, but not in practice) that segregation on interstate transportation violated the Commerce Clause of the Constitution. That decision fueled the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation, in which sixteen men, eight black and eight white, boarded buses in order to test whether or not the Morgan decision was recognized on the ground and to educate people about the case.

Irene Morgan has played a real and important role in my development as a historian. In a seminar class as a PhD student I investigated the Morgan decision and Journey of Reconciliation and it was from that work that I began pursuing my dissertation on the fight to desegregate interstate transportation. That project in turn has become my book manuscript, about which I hope to have some long-awaited positive news in the next six weeks. The events of the 1940s occupy three chapters of that manuscript. Without Irene Morgan's brave stand against Jim Crow, my own career might be rather different. And of course that is the least of her contributions.