By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31871975

By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31871975

Irene Morgan

When Seventh-day Adventist Irene Morgan (1917-2007) refused to give up her seat as a black woman traveling on an interstate bus in 1944, the driver summoned a Virginia sheriff to arrest her. Morgan tore up the arrest warrant and resisted the officer. She fought her case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court with the help of the NAACP’s legal counsel, future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.  In the landmark Irene Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia decision in 1946, the Court ruled in Morgan’s favor, declaring that segregation was illegal in interstate travel. Morgan’s example  inspired the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation in which civil rights activists rode buses into the Deep South to test enforcement of the Court’s ruling, meeting with arrests and violence along the way. The Journey of Reconciliation in turn inspired the famous Freedom rides of 1961.