Irene Morgan in Civil Rights Movement: Desegregation
Irene Morgan (1917–2007) was a young African-American woman who, in 1944, refused to give up her seat to a white couple on a Greyhound bus leaving from Virginia.
In the summer of 1944, Morgan, a young mother of two living in Virginia, boarded a Greyhound bus headed for Baltimore, Maryland. She sat in a row in the "colored" section, but when a white couple needed seats the bus driver demanded that Morgan stand and move further back. Morgan refused and was arrested, jailed, and fined.
Two years later, in Irene Morgan v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against segregation in interstate travel.