Morgan v. Virginia

In July of 1944, 11 years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, a young woman named Irene Morgan rejected that same demand on an interstate bus headed to Maryland from Gloucester, Virginia. Recovering from a miscarriage and already sitting far in the back, she defied the driver's order to surrender her seat to a white couple. For her actions, like Parks, Morgan was arrested. Eventually, her action caught the attention of lawyers of the NAACP, in which her case, led by Thurgood Marshall and William Hastie, reached the Supreme Court in two years. Once in court, instead of seeking a judgement on humanitarian grounds or the equal protection provisions of the 14th Amendment, they argued that interstate travel violated the Constitution's Interstate Commerce Clause. On June 3, 1946, that strategy paid off. The court ruled in Mrs. Morgan's favor, stating that segregation in interstate was indeed unconstitutional. Though that decision was now law, the southern states refused it and Jim Crow continued as the way of life in the South.