She always loved Gloucester. Now , who fought bus segregation, has a highway marker there.

By Matt Jones Daily Press | Jan 31, 2020 at 9:08 AM

HAYES — Brenda Bacquie hated going to the movies with her mother. In the years during and after World War II, it wasn’t uncommon for theaters to play the National Anthem before movies. For Bacquie, born in 1942, it was a normal part of growing up in New York. But her mother, Irene Morgan, would insist that she and her brother stay seated. “When it is the home of the free and the brave, I’ll be the first to stand up. When this country lives by its principles, I will be the first to stand up,” Morgan told her daughter. “Until then, I will never stand up up.” On Saturday at 10 a.m., a new highway marker will be dedicated in Gloucester County at 2425 Hayes Road that describes a Greyhound bus Morgan took on July 16, 1944. That ride led to a Supreme Court case ruling that segregation of interstate travel was unconstitutional. The spot, at the corner of Hayes Road and Hook Road, used to be the site of Hayes Store. Morgan boarded the bus there after leaving her children at her mother’s house on Guinea Road. As the bus traveled north, it picked up more passengers, slowly running out of seats. About 25 miles from Hayes, the bus driver ordered Morgan, who was sitting in the back rows set aside for black passengers, to give up her seat for whites. She refused. In Saluda, the bus driver went to the courthouse and brought back sheriff’s deputies to arrest her under ’s segregation laws. Morgan fought back, kicking and scratching the deputies who eventually took her into custody. Although Morgan agreed to pay a $100 fine for resisting arrest, she refused to plead guilty to violating the bus segregation statute. With the help of future Supreme Court justice and the NAACP, Morgan appealed her case to the Supreme Court. In 1946, the court ruled that enforcing segregation in interstate travel violated the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution, which gives the federal government sole authority in regulating transactions between states. The new marker in Gloucester is not the first describing Morgan’s journey. In 2012, a marker was put up in Saluda, where Morgan was arrested. Previous coverage: Civil rights pioneer Morgan to be honored with highway marker in Middlesex » But Gloucester was an important place for Morgan, who took the last name of her second husband Stanley Kirkaldy after the case. “Her heart was always here in Gloucester,” Bacquie said in an interview at her Gloucester home. Her mother insisted they move there together when Bacquie retired. She wasn’t from there; Morgan was born in in 1917. But her mother was raised in Gloucester and moved later in life to a spot about a quarter of a mile from where Bacquie lives now. Morgan’s grandmother and great-uncle had been enslaved at a plantation in Hayes before the Civil War. The owner of the plantation deeded a tract of land along Guinea Road to her great-uncle, making him one of the first ex-slave landowners in the county. Bacquie and her brother, Sherwood Morgan Jr., often spent summers at their grandmother’s house. She hated those visits though — the house didn’t have electricity or running water. “The only thing that we had that was updated was a telephone. That was it,” Bacquie. Morgan only made it to the start of high school before dropping out to clean houses and cook during the Great Depression. She made parachutes during World War II, and at the end of the war worked for the federal government for a while. She and Kirkaldy later owned a dry-cleaning business and a daycare center together. After Morgan retired, she didn’t stop — she went back to college. She got her bachelor’s degree from St. John’s University at the age of 68 and a master’s degree from College at the age of 73. Their businesses afforded them a certain level of comfort, according to Bacquie, which meant that Morgan was always looking to give back. Her mother’s Thanksgiving tradition was to take a van out and pick up people living on the street in the Bowery in Manhattan. She’d bring them back to the house, let them shower and give them clothes before they all sat down for Thanksgiving with the family. “We’d beg her, 'Please don’t do this, don’t do this,” Bacquie said. “She said, ‘Listen. We are blessed. We have more than we need, and we’re going to share.’” Morgan didn’t get much recognition for her case for decades, unlike Rosa Park’s refusal to move on a city bus in Alabama 11 years later. She didn’t like to tout her involvement much. Dorothy Cooke, one of the marker’s co-sponsors, said that the lack of an organized movement in 1944 meant there was no one to publicly champion her contributions. “Martin Luther King Jr. was alive at that time and he sort of carried the ball forward, you remember the movement then, the marches and everything," Cooke said. "But back in 1944, when Ms. Morgan refused to get up — I like to think she took a stand not to take a stand — there wasn’t anybody to carry the ball as Dr. King did for Mrs. Parks.” That started to change around 1995, when the documentary “You Don’t have to Ride Jim Crow” helped resurface her story and men who tested the ruling in following years. When Cooke and others researching local history for Gloucester’s 350th anniversary celebration in 2000 found out about Morgan’s connection to the county, she was invited to a ceremony in Gloucester. The Washington Post published an article about her before the ceremony, and more stories came soon after. “Local people weren’t that much aware of Ms. Morgan and what she actually did,” Cooke said. That attracted national attention. Later that year, Bacquie got a call at the Long Island home she shared with her mother. The caller said it was the White House. Bacquie hung up, thinking it was a prank. They called again: President wanted to talk to Irene Morgan. Bacquie hung up again. Eventually, Bacquie figured out it was actually the White House. Clinton wanted to give her a Presidential Citizens Medal. “She said, ‘Oh, why bother, you know it’s so many years ago. What’s the point?’” Bacquie said. “So I said, ‘Listen, let’s go ahead and do it.’ So she said, ‘Alright, if you insist.’” Previous coverage: Local hero gets presidential honor » Cooke said she had started working on a highway marker as early as 2000. But the subject of the marker has to be deceased, according to Virginia Department of Historical Resources rules. Morgan died in Gloucester in 2007. Hundreds of people, some from as far away as , showed up to a memorial service at Gloucester High School. Cooke said that the The Friends of the Gloucester Museum raised the money to put up the new marker, which was approved by the Virginia Board of Historic Resources in June 2019. On Saturday, Bacquie, Cooke and others will speak about Morgan and her importance to the community at an unveiling ceremony. “I call her Gloucester’s ,” Cooke, who is the chair of the planning committee and the county’s African-American history celebration, said. Bacquie said that Morgan’s commitment to justice never waned. She helped fight for school desegregation in Baltimore, lobbied colleges to divest from South Africa during apartheid, and passed her values onto to Bacquie’s children, who are coming to the ceremony Saturday. Even after she moved to Gloucester, she was still concerned about it. Morgan was raised a Seventh-Day Adventist, so Bacquie found a church for them to visit in the county shortly after they moved. After the service, a white man approached them and told them about another Seventh-Day Adventist church in neighboring Mathews County. It was a mostly Black congregation, he said, and they’d be "more comfortable” there. “What do you think he meant by that?” Morgan asked her daughter when they got home. Bacquie said she wasn’t sure what his intentions were. The next time, they went to the church in Mathews instead. Matt Jones, 757-247-4729, [email protected]