Editorial: A fighter for civil rights

Sunday, Aug. 19, 2007 | 1:14 a.m.

Irene Morgan Kirkaldy boarded a Greyhound bus in Gloucester County, Va., on a Sunday morning in 1944 wearing her church clothes and carrying a Bible. A black woman, she picked a seat four rows from the back of the bus and settled in for a long trip to Baltimore.

Even though she was sitting in the segregated area of the bus, as mandated by Virginia law, she was ordered to move to the back of the bus to make way for a white couple. She refused and, after a fight, was arrested. She refused to accept that and fought all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where in 1946 she won a landmark decision that helped undercut segregation in the United States.

A civil rights pioneer, Kirkaldy died last week at the age 90. Eleven years before Rosa Parks' courageous refusal to move to the back of a Montgomery, Ala., bus, Kirkaldy's refusal stirred the civil rights movement, inspiring the first wave of Freedom Riders to test the law.

Kirkaldy, who was recovering from a miscarriage at the time, simply would not back down. Not to the bus driver or to the sheriff's deputies who tried to remover her. One deputy handed her a citation, which she shredded and threw out the window. He then tried to arrest her and, "That's when I kicked him in a very bad place," she told The Washington Post in 2000. Another deputy came to get her. "He said he'd use his nightstick. I said, 'We'll whip each other.' "

The fought but she eventually ended up in jail. Future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall successfully took her case to the high court, where justice started to erode the Jim Crow laws.

After that, she never received much recognition and her family said she never looked for it. She was recognized in 2001 when President Bill Clinton awarded her the Presidential Citizens Medal. The award citation summed it up well:

"When Irene Morgan boarded a bus for Baltimore in the summer of 1944, she took the first step on a journey that would change America forever."

Indeed. She fought the good fight and should be remembered for it.