Irene Morgan

Irene Morgan Kirkaldy ( born April 9, 1917 in Baltimore, Maryland; † 10 August 2007 at Gloucester County, Virginia) was an American civil rights activist. It participated in the struggle for the abolition of state-sanctioned racial segregation in the United States.

Eleven years earlier than the later become known Rosa Parks Morgan was arrested as 27 -year-old because she wanted to give up on the journey from Gloucester to Baltimore not for a white man her seat in a Greyhound bus.

In its lawsuit against the government of the State of Virginia, she was the lawyer of the Association NAACP, Thurgood Marshall represented. The process led in 1946 to the determination that the federal law in cases where segregation laws are involved in interstate conveyances, shall not apply, because they contravened the provisions of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

Morgan's case inspired the first Freedom Ride 16 civil rights, a tour with buses and trains between the states in the south of the USA.

In 2007, she died at the age of 90 years in Gloucester County, Virginia.