African American Public Relations Corporation

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Tuesday, August 14, 2007

IRENE MORGAN

Irene Morgan Kirkaldy, 90; won early battle against Jim Crow bus laws

By Elaine Woo
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
August 14, 2007

Irene Morgan Kirkaldy, whose defiance of bus segregation laws -- more than a decade before Rosa Parks' landmark case -- helped lay the foundation for later civil rights victories, died Friday at her home in Hayes, Va. She was 90. The cause was complications of Alzheimer's disease, according to her granddaughter Aleah Bacquie Vaughn.

On a hot July morning in 1944, Kirkaldy, who was then known as Morgan, was riding a crowded Greyhound bus from Hayes to Baltimore when a white couple boarded and the driver demanded her seat. The mother of two, who helped build B-26 bombers at a plant in Baltimore, refused.

She had no overarching agenda to challenge the entrenched racism of the era and no intention of picking a fight. If she had, she would not have taken a seat at the rear of the bus, in accordance with Jim Crow laws.Morgan refused because she had paid for her seat and she wasn't feeling well, having recently suffered a miscarriage.


"I can't see how anybody in the same circumstances could do otherwise," she told the Washington Post years later. "I didn't do anything wrong. I'd paid for my seat. I was sitting where I was supposed to.

"Her rebellion led to her arrest and eventually to the U.S. Supreme Court, which decided in her favor June 3, 1946, when, in Morgan vs. Virginia, it declared interstate bus segregation unconstitutional.

The Parks case involved intrastate bus travel and attracted far more public attention, in part because of the bus boycotts that followed in its wake and the eloquent advocacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

But "if you know the name Rosa Parks, you need to know the name Irene Morgan," said Robin Washington, an editor at the Duluth News Tribune who produced an award-winning 1995 documentary about the freedom riders called "You Don't Have to Ride Jim Crow!"

"She did everything that Rosa Parks did, with very little knowledge that anyone would come to her aid. Irene Morgan was simply doing what she thought was right," Washington said.

Her case inspired the first formal "freedom ride" in 1947, when an interracial group led by civil rights leader Bayard Rustin traveled by bus and train from Washington, D.C., to Louisville, Ky., to challenge Southern states to implement the Supreme Court's decision in the case. Their actions in turn set the mold for the famous rides across the South during the spring and summer of 1961, which helped awaken the nation to racial injustice.

On that July day in 1944 when Morgan rode the bus, all she wanted was to get home to Baltimore to see her husband and her doctor. She had left her children with her mother in Hayes and hoped the doctor would tell her she was well enough to return to work at the plant where she helped assemble B-26 Marauders.

The Greyhound was jammed, leaving her no choice at first but to stand in the aisle. After a short while, Raymond Arsenault wrote in his 2005 book "Freedom Riders," she "accepted the invitation of a young black woman who graciously offered her a lap to sit on."

About 20 miles later, a seat opened up and Morgan sat down. The back of the bus was an ever-shifting zone that was reduced depending on the number of white passengers. On this day, Morgan found herself sitting directly in front of a pair of whites, even though she was in the third row from the back.

Because she was not sitting next to a white person, she thought she was safe. But then two more whites boarded the bus and the driver turned to Morgan and the woman next to her. He told both of them to give up their seats. Morgan refused and also tried to stop her seatmate, a young mother, from complying, saying: "Sit down. Where do you think you're going with that baby in your arms?"

At the next town, Saluda, the driver headed for the jail. A deputy claiming to have a warrant for her arrest ordered Morgan off the bus.

"You don't even know my name," she told him, and ripped up the warrant.

According to her granddaughter, she then said she was willing to be arrested but warned the deputy not to touch her. Unschooled in nonviolence but a firm believer in self-defense, Morgan made the deputy regret his next move.

"When he put his hands on me, I kicked him where men should not be kicked," she told Newsday in 2000. He hobbled off the bus, and another deputy weighed in. When he tried to grab her, "I started to bite him," she recalled, "but he looked so dirty I didn't want to touch him."

She was thrown in jail, charged with resisting arrest and violating Virginia's Jim Crow transit laws.

Her mother paid $500 bail, and three months later, determined to see justice served, Morgan stood before a judge in Middlesex County, Va., to plead her case. She agreed to pay the $100 fine for resisting arrest but would not concede on the issue of breaking segregation laws.

Her decision to appeal the latter conviction caught the attention of lawyers for the NAACP, led by Thurgood Marshall, who were searching for test cases to challenge the Jim Crow laws. Marshall and his team, which included Spottswood Robinson and William Hastie, took the case to the Supreme Court using an unusual argument.

They did not argue that segregation was wrong. They argued that it impeded commerce between the states. The court ruled 6 to 1 in Morgan's favor, declaring that "seating arrangements for the different races in interstate motor travel require a single, uniform rule to promote and protect national travel."

Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the black New York congressman from Harlem, called the case "the most important step toward winning the peace at home since the conclusion of the war."

Morgan was thrilled by the victory, but it was largely ignored by bus companies, which treated the decision "as if it did not exist," James Peck, one of the organizers of the 1947 freedom ride, wrote.

As the movement moved on to other battles, Morgan returned to her family. She faded into obscurity but didn't shrink from carrying out a personal vision of justice.

A high school dropout, she worked an extra job to put her sister through college.

She helped save a man from a burning house. She drafted petitions to desegregate Baltimore schools. For many years, after she had remarried and was living in New York, she sent her husband to the Bowery every year at Thanksgiving with instructions to bring back homeless men to join in the family dinner.

"She introduced them as Uncle So-and-So," Vaughn said, "and she sent them away with clothes and food."

Late in life, she returned to school, earning a bachelor's degree from St. John's University at 68 and a master's in urban studies from Queens College at 73.

The granddaughter of slaves who had worked as a laundress and a maid, Morgan received overdue recognition in 2000 when she was 83 and the town of Gloucester, where she had boarded the bus in 1944, honored her with a day called "A Homecoming for Irene Morgan.

"The next year, President Clinton called out her name, along with those of Muhammad Ali, Hank Aaron and 25 others, to receive the Presidential Citizens Medal.The citation noted that she "took the first step on a journey that would change America forever."

She is survived by her daughter, Brenda Morgan Bacquie; son, Sherwood Morgan Jr.; two sisters; five granddaughters; and four great-grandchildren.

elaine.woo@latimes.com

Monday, August 06, 2007

OLIVER W. HILL

Civil Rights Crusader

Monday, Aug 06, 2007 - 12:10 AM Updated: 09:43 AM

By ELLEN ROBERTSON, MICHAEL PAUL WILLIAMS AND LINDSAY KASTNER

FULL COVERAGE: Oliver W. Hill 1907-2007

Oliver W. Hill Sr., a pivotal figure in the fight to desegregate schools in Virginia and across the nation, died Sunday morning at his Richmond home. He was 100.

Mr. Hill's son, Oliver Hill Jr., said Mr. Hill died while the family was eating breakfast together. "It was a very peaceful ending," he said.

Mr. Hill was a lawyer and a former Richmond city councilman, the first black person elected to that office in the 20th century.

During the segregation era, Mr. Hill's legal team filed more civil-rights suits in Virginia than were filed in any other state in the South. The team won landmark decisions involving voting rights, jury selection, access to school buses, employment protection and other matters.

He played a crucial role in the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 that outlawed school segregation in the U.S.

"Few individuals in Virginia's rich history have worked as tirelessly as Oliver Hill to make life better for all of our citizens," Gov. Timothy M. Kaine said in a statement. "His life's work was predicated on the simple truth that all men and women truly are created equal."

Former Gov. and U.S. Sen. Charles S. Robb, D-Va., once described Mr. Hill as the "last lion of the civil-rights movement." As a senator, Robb nominated Mr. Hill for the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, which Mr. Hill received in a 1999 White House ceremony.

In 2005, Mr. Hill received the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's highest honor, the Spingarn Medal. NAACP board Chairman Julian Bond called Mr. Hill "a giant in civil-rights law . . . risking life and limb to defend civil rights in hostile circumstances."
. . .
A founder of the state chapter of the NAACP in 1934, Mr. Hill played a key role on the legal team for the national organization in earning the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision. That unanimous decision held that school segregation was unconstitutional.

Mr. Hill said later that Prince Edward County was not the battleground he would have chosen for that epic fight. He would have preferred a big-city courtroom, where he might be able to gain greater exposure and greater public support.

But after black students from the county's Robert R. Moton High School went on strike in 1951 to protest inadequate school facilities and wrote to him seeking legal help, he reluctantly agreed to meet with them -- in the basement of a Farmville church on his way to try another civil-rights case in Southwest Virginia.

At first, he urged the students to go back to school. "But we found them so well-organized we didn't have the heart to break their spirit," Mr. Hill said in 1979. "We told them if their parents were willing to support them, we would meet them again and talk about it, and that's why we got into it."

That case became one of the original cases in the Brown decision.

In June 1959, white officials in Prince Edward County closed the county's schools to avoid desegregation. The schools remained closed until September 1964.

At the height of the battle, Mr. Hill emphasized, "We are battling the segregationists, not the white race. We have no desire to take anything from any white person granted him under the law or our common Christian concepts. . . .

"We are now in a period of desegregation, and must remember that integration is a social process that is quite different, and which will come in time."
. . .
Speaking throughout his career to various groups, Mr. Hill hammered home his philosophy time and again: "The Negro must expand his thinking beyond the other side of the tracks where he often has lived. We must come to think of ourselves as members of the general public, and not as a group apart which need not concern itself with community functions."

In a 1991 interview, he recalled, "I never had a class with white folks, and I never believed Negro children had to go to school with white children in order to learn. But I fought for school integration because I believed that for the Negro to enjoy the full advantages of our culture, he needed to be associated with the people who run that culture."

Born Oliver White in Richmond, he was the son of a minister who deserted the family when Mr. Hill was an infant. Mr. Hill took the name of his stepfather early in life and became Oliver W. Hill. At age 6, he moved with his family to Roanoke, where he attended elementary school. He went to the old Dunbar High School in Washington because of the inadequacy of Roanoke's black schools.

In 1931, he graduated from Howard University, where he also earned a law degree in 1933. He was second in his law class, behind his best friend, Thurgood Marshall, who was to become a chief ally in the desegregation fight and who later was the first black justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.

In a 1992 interview, Marshall said Mr. Hill "was well-educated, and he was a person you could rely upon. Those don't come often. I don't know anything I can say that's good enough for Oliver Hill."

Mr. Hill said his stepuncle influenced him to study law.

"He had a day job and practiced law at night, what we called a sundown practice," Mr. Hill said. "When he died, his widow gave me some of his law books to read, and that's when I figured out that segregation was for the birds. So I decided to become a lawyer and fight to change things."

During the 1930s, Mr. Hill was part of what was called a "family group" formed at Howard University by faculty and students to combat segregation. "We knew one day there would have to be a Brown decision. We began making plans to move forward legally working to change the status quo," he said in a 1981 interview.

Mr. Hill began practicing law in Roanoke but returned to Washington in 1936. Three years later, he moved to Richmond at the invitation of friends to join a law firm. Those plans fell through and he opened his own office. He later joined Martin A. Martin and Spottswood Robinson III to form the law firm of Hill, Martin & Robinson at 623 N. Third St. . . .

Mr. Hill and Robinson toured Virginia seeking civil-rights cases. During the late 1930s and early 1940s, their target was equalization of teachers' pay, school facilities and bus transportation for black pupils.

Mr. Hill was drafted into the Army in 1943 and served as a staff sergeant in an engineering outfit that landed on Omaha Beach in France on D-Day.

In 1947, two years after his military discharge, he was defeated in the Democratic primary election for a seat in the Virginia House of Delegates by fewer than 200 votes.

A year later, when the city's population was 30 percent black, he was the first black person to be elected to the Richmond City Council in the 20th century. He said at the time that he believed his election would give black Richmonders a greater feeling of the responsibility of citizenship and that his presence on council might help remove prejudices against blacks.

He was given the Chicago Defender Merit Award for courage in entering politics in a Southern state.

Mr. Hill was defeated in a re-election bid for the City Council by 44 votes in 1950. That year, he also participated in the first suit brought in North Carolina to force equalization of school facilities for children of all races.

Mr. Hill and Robinson continued at the forefront of the civil-rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, bringing lawsuits challenging segregated schools.

Kaine's statement yesterday said, "With righteous determination, a sense of honor, and at considerable personal risk, Mr. Hill methodically and skillfully worked within the legal system to win landmark cases in voting rights, equal pay, better schools, and fair housing."

In 1952, President Harry S. Truman named Mr. Hill to his newly-created Committee on Government Contract Compliance, set up to help enforce the anti-discrimination clauses written into government contracts with private firms.

In 1960, Mr. Hill was named to the national Democratic Party's Biracial Committee on Civil Rights. The committee, headed by former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, was to propose a civil-rights plank for the party's convention that year.

The Richmond City Democratic Convention voted to censure the national Democratic Party chairman for appointing Mr. Hill.

Mr. Hill served as chief counsel for the Virginia Branch of the NAACP until 1961, when he became assistant for intergroup relations to the commissioner of the Federal Housing Administration. The job involved broadening housing opportunities for all Americans. At the time, he also withdrew as NAACP counsel in the Prince Edward County school desegregation case.

He quit his federal job in 1966 to return to private law practice as a partner of the law firm of Hill, Tucker and Marsh at 509 N. Third St. Two years later, he was appointed by Gov. Mills E. Godwin Jr. to the Virginia Constitutional Revision Commission, which drafted the state's 1971 constitution.

In 1980, Mr. Hill argued for the appointment of James E. Sheffield as the first black federal judge in Virginia. Speaking in behalf of Sheffield, Mr. Hill told the Senate Judiciary Committee, "In my generation, everybody who was really ambitious politically left Virginia."
In his later years, Mr. Hill commented on how segregation dominated his career path. "I would have loved to have gone to Congress . . . if we had lived in a free society. But we had more important things to do."

He was a charter member of the Richmond Civic Council, which encouraged blacks to take part in city government. He was twice president of the Old Dominion Bar Association and was a member of local, state and national bars.

He was a member of the American College of Trial Lawyers, an honorary organization that seeks to improve the standards of trial practice, the administration of justice and ethics of the trial branch. Its membership is limited to a maximum of 1 percent of the lawyers practicing in a state.

In 1992, Mr. Hill was named a charter member of the Civil Rights Hall of Fame of the Virginia State Conference of the NAACP. In 1989, the Richmond Bar Association's established its Hill-Tucker Public Service Award, named for it first recipients.

Mr. Hill was among four leaders in the fight for civil rights in Virginia who received the National Bar Association's annual Wiley A. Branton Award in 1993. That same year, he received the prestigious American Bar Association's highest award for public service, the Pro Bono Publico Award, for his contributions to free legal service to the poor.

In March 1994, Mr. Hill and Lewis F. Powell Jr., a retired U.S. Supreme Court justice, were the first recipients of the annual Distinguished Citizen Awards from the Richmond City Council.
An Oliver W. Hill Scholarship Fund was set up for Virginia students attending Howard University Law School. And in 1996, the city's new juvenile courts building was named in his honor.

The Oliver W. Hill Freedom Fighter Award was created in 1999 "to honor those who would dare to fight for a just world, even at the risk of losing physical comfort, security and safety."
In October 2005, in a move that represented the full-circle of Mr. Hill's career and Virginia history, the state renamed its renovated Finance Building, once a pillar of segregation-era politics and patronage, as the Oliver W. Hill Sr. Building.

Mr. Hill celebrated his 100th birthday in May, at the inaugural fundraiser for the Oliver White Hill Foundation, created to honor his legacy. With help from the city of Roanoke, the foundation purchased Mr. Hill's boyhood home, which it is restoring for use as a center where law students can provide pro bono assistance to area residents.

Mr. Hill's wife, Beresenia Walker Hill, died in 1993. Among his survivors are a son, Oliver W. Hill Jr. of Richmond, and three grandchildren.

Funeral arrangements are incomplete.