GLOUCESTER, Va. – Irene Morgan Kirkaldy, a black woman whose refusal to give up her bus seat to white passengers led to a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision more than a decade before Rosa Parks gained recognition for doing the same, has died at 90.
Kirkaldy died Friday at her daughter’s home, said Fred Carter, director of Carter Funeral Home in Newport News.
Kirkaldy, born Irene Morgan in Baltimore in 1917, was arrested in 1944 for refusing to give up her seat on a Greyhound bus heading from Gloucester to Baltimore, and for resisting arrest.
Her case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court by an NAACP lawyer named Thurgood Marshall, who later became the first black justice on the high court.
The Supreme Court held in June 1946 that Virginia law requiring the races to be separated on interstate buses was an invalid interference in interstate commerce.
At the time, the case received little attention, and not all bus companies complied with the ruling at first, but it paved the way for civil rights victories to come, including Parks’ famous stand on a local bus in Montgomery, Ala., in 1955.
Kirkaldy also inspired the first Freedom Ride in 1947, when 16 civil rights activists rode buses and trains through the South to test the Supreme Court decision.
In 2001, President Bill Clinton awarded her the Presidential Citizens Medal – the second-highest civilian honor in the United States.
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