She Came Before Rosa Parks...

The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia August 13, 2007 Irene Morgan Kirkaldy, 90, Rights Pioneer, Dies By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN Irene Morgan Kirkaldy, whose defiance of white supremacy while traveling through the Upper South in the summer of 1944 led to a Supreme Court decision outlawing segregated seating on interstate bus lines, died Friday in Hayes, Va. She was 90. The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, said her granddaughter Janine Bacquie. Irene Morgan’s fight against segregation took place a decade before the modern civil rights movement changed America. Taken up by the N.A.A.C.P. and argued before the Supreme Court by Thurgood Marshall, later the court’s first black justice, it proved a forerunner to Rosa Parks’s storied refusal to yield her seat on a city bus in Montgomery, Ala... Full Story (Photo): Irene Morgan Kirkaldy, 90, Rights Pioneer, Dies - New York Times