Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History (22 page)

“You’re at the new county jail,” a uniformed guard tells me after I briefly explain Morgan’s story and the purpose of my visit. “You want the old jail.”

“Is that a far drive from here?” I ask.

“This is Saluda; it’s not even a far walk. Go left out of the parking lot, up the hill one block, and it’s the building behind the old courthouse.”

“So you’re familiar with Irene Morgan and her arrest?”

“No, but back then the old jail is where she would’ve gone.”

The square, two-story red-brick building is, I find, on the corner of
Bowden and Oakes Landing. According to a sign by the front door, it’s now the Virginia Cooperative Extension for Middlesex County. Small and quaint, the structure itself suggests nothing of its former role.

After being incarcerated here, Morgan pled guilty to resisting arrest and paid a $100 fine. But on principle she would not pay the $10 for violating the state’s segregation law.

Her attorney, Spottswood Robinson III, knew that Virginia wasn’t about to overturn its race-based statutes and chose not to argue the case on moral grounds. Instead, he claimed that the law hindered interstate commerce because it placed an undue burden on bus companies by requiring them to constantly shift their passengers around depending on the region. Had Morgan’s bus been in Washington, D.C., when the white passengers boarded, she wouldn’t have been forced to move.

Unconvinced, the Middlesex Circuit Court ruled against Morgan, as did the Virginia Supreme Court.

With two new lawyers, William Hastie and Thurgood Marshall, now leading the fight, Morgan took her battle to the U.S. Supreme Court. Seven years earlier, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had appointed Hastie to the U.S. District Court for the Virgin Islands, making him the first African American federal judge. He served on the bench for two years and then became the dean of Howard University’s School of Law, where he had been a professor. One of his students, in fact, was Thurgood Marshall. (President John F. Kennedy intended to make Hastie the first African American justice on the Supreme Court, but after Kennedy was assassinated, President Lyndon Johnson nominated Marshall instead.) Marshall was the NAACP’s chief counsel, and in
Irene Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia
, he and Hastie built on Spottswood Robinson’s original legal strategy, focusing less on the fundamental injustice of Virginia’s discriminatory laws and more on the U.S. Constitution’s commerce clause.

It worked. On June 3, 1946, the Court voted in favor of Morgan 6–1. (With Chief Justice Harlan Stone’s recent death there were only
eight justices, and Robert Jackson abstained because he was in Germany presiding over the Nuremberg trials.)

“The interferences to interstate commerce which arise from state regulation of racial association on interstate vehicles has long been recognized,” Justice Stanley Reed wrote in the majority opinion.

Justice Harold Burton, the lone dissenter, argued that if the Court imposed uniformity here, other segregation laws could be overturned as well. “On the precedent of this case,” he wrote in his opinion, “the laws of the 10 states requiring racial separation apparently can be invalidated because of their sharp diversity from the laws in the rest of the Union.”

Fortunately, he was correct; after Irene Morgan’s case, a series of similar rulings followed that helped to systematically dismantle Jim Crow laws nationwide. In 1956 the Supreme Court upheld
Browder v. Gayle
, a case similar to
Morgan
that was sparked by the incarceration of Claudette Colvin, who, on March 2, 1955, wouldn’t give up her seat on a city transit bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Colvin’s act of civil disobedience preceded Rosa Parks’s by nine months, and the local NAACP chapter was looking for just this type of incident, along with a sympathetic victim, to spark a bus boycott throughout Montgomery. A smart fifteen-year-old student on her way home from school, Colvin seemed perfect at first. And she might well have been lionized as a civil
rights pioneer and achieved Rosa Parks’s iconic status had it not turned out that the teenage girl was pregnant, and the father was a married man. Leaders within the African American community felt these revelations would undermine the greater cause, so they waited for another arrest. On December 1, 1955, police handcuffed the quiet, church-going seamstress Rosa Parks, and the historic boycott began two days later. It continued until December 1956, when
Browder v. Gayle
desegregated all Alabama city buses.

Stirred by Irene Morgan’s courage and the outcome of her Supreme Court decision, sixteen young men (eight of them white, eight black) rode a bus together through Virginia and North Carolina in what they called a Journey of Reconciliation. This, in turn, inspired the Freedom Riders, a much larger group of whites and blacks who traveled on Greyhound and Trailways buses across the South during the summer of 1961. Their actions—along with nonviolent protests, sit-ins, and marches—shone a glaring spotlight on the racism that permeated much of the country and culminated in the sweeping Civil Rights Act of 1964.

While walking back to the parking lot near the new jail, I pass Saluda’s sheriff’s department and notice three officers leaning up against their squad cars, chatting casually. I jog over and, after giving them the thirty-second version of Irene Morgan’s case, ask if her name sounds at all familiar.

They shake their heads, a collective nope.

“Kind of a Rosa Parks thing,” one remarks.

“The stories are almost identical,” I say. “But Morgan fought back and ended up kicking one of the deputies in the groin.”

They all flinch.

“Ooh, not a good idea,” one says, chuckling.

“Anyway, sorry for interrupting. I’m just trying to get a sense of how well known Irene Morgan is around here.”

Morgan, who died in August 2007, would have been the first to acknowledge that, like Rosa Parks, she too had her predecessors. On
July 16, 1854, exactly ninety years to the day before Morgan landed in the Saluda jail, schoolteacher Elizabeth Jennings was roughed up on her way to church by a Manhattan carriage driver who wouldn’t let her board his horse-drawn bus. Back then, African Americans were prohibited from riding in certain trolleys and buses entirely. Represented by twenty-four-year-old (and future U.S. president) Chester A. Arthur, Jennings forced the Third Avenue Railway Company to change its policy. “Colored persons if sober, well behaved and free from disease,” Judge William Rockwell reasoned, “had the same rights as others and could neither be excluded by any rules of the Company, nor by force or violence.” The case, however, had no bearing outside of New York.

And a mere ten days before Morgan’s fateful stop in Saluda, twenty-five-year-old Lieutenant Jack Roosevelt “Jackie” Robinson was accosted by a driver for not moving from his seat on an Army bus—despite the recent integration of all military transportation. Robinson’s furious reaction almost earned him a court-martial, but he was spared because he was already a star athlete (and this was three years before he broke professional baseball’s color barrier in 1947). The fact that a world war was raging in July 1944 is another reason why Irene Morgan’s run-in with the law didn’t elicit the same attention as Rosa Parks’s arrest did a decade later. The D-Day landings were barely a month old, and Americans were understandably preoccupied with frequent news updates about Allied troops thrashing their way across Europe. (And, not to belabor the point, Parks might have been regarded very differently if she had slammed her knee into a deputy sheriff’s groin.)

After her husband passed away in 1948, Morgan left Virginia for Queens, New York, where she operated a child care business. At the age of sixty-eight she attended St. John’s University to acquire her bachelor of arts degree, and five years later she earned a master’s degree from Queens College. Morgan moved back to Virginia in 2002 and passed away at the age of ninety.

From her obituary and the few local newspaper articles written about Irene Morgan, what emerges is a portrait of a devout, humble individual who downplayed her actions and felt uncomfortable
accepting accolades she believed were undeserved. When Howard University wanted to grant her an honorary doctorate for winning one of the first major national victories in the battle for civil rights, Morgan expressed enormous gratitude for the offer. But, having worked hard to receive her other degrees, she politely declined, explaining to university officials: “I didn’t earn it.”

DRIVING DOWN ROUTE
36 near Stockton, Utah, on my way to the Dugway Proving Ground, I notice a sign for the Deseret Chemical Depot and impulsively turn in to the unpaved entrance. At both Deseret and Dugway, the U.S. military conducted medical experiments on human subjects, and the testing at Dugway led to a
lawsuit by one of the victims. I’d heard about the Deseret Chemical Depot while investigating Dugway and had assumed it was in the town of Deseret, some hundred miles south of here, so this is a pleasant and convenient surprise. Barely visible in the shallow valley about two miles below are rows of white rectangular buildings that, from here, look no bigger than grains of rice. I decide to linger at this overlook and shoot a few pictures of the old Army facility for my personal photo journal. Dugway is still active, but I remember reading that Deseret was closed years ago.

It was not.

After clicking off seven photographs of the main sign, I hear tires crunching on gravel and turn around just as a white sedan pulls up behind me. For a split second I think it might be a lost tourist in need of directions or another weekend history sleuth interested in obscure sites. Sun glare on the windshield prevents me from seeing a face, but through the side window I glimpse the driver’s left arm. Desert cammies. Military police.

My heart starts pounding. I cap my camera and hesitantly walk over. The soldier is already on his cell phone reading off my license plate number.

“Hi,” I say meekly after he hangs up. “I’m just taking some pictures of the sign. Is that okay?”

He rolls down his window and asks me why.

“I’m researching little-known history sites across America, and I just came across this abandoned Army post.”

“It’s not abandoned.”

“I swear I didn’t know that,” I say. “I had read somewhere that it was closed.” I show him the display screen of my digital camera. “Here are the photos I took so far, just seven of them, and I only shot the entrance, none of the buildings below. I can delete these right in front of you.”

“I’m not sure you need to do that.”

Relief. “Okay, well, I didn’t mean to cause any trouble, and obviously I won’t take any more pictures.”

I am heading back to my car when he calls out, “Hey, I didn’t say you could go. You gotta wait till my boss gets here.”

Full-blown panic.

Several scenarios flash to mind. In the worst case, I’ll be arrested. Or they might confiscate my camera, which would also be very bad because along with the depot there are pictures of other sites I haven’t had time to back up on my computer. I can’t surreptitiously switch the flash card with a blank one because the MP knows there are photos on here.

A white SUV comes up from the depot. And then two more, the first of which angles itself to block me in.

“What’s up, buddy?” a soldier in his mid-thirties asks. Of the seven or eight other troops now on the scene, most stay in their vehicles, but two get out and keep an eye on me. I’ve never been good at determining enlisted ranks from uniforms, but I think the soldier questioning me is a staff sergeant. They all appear to be with the Utah National Guard.

I emphasize that I truly thought the base was inactive. “I mean, from up here. It
looks
deserted,” I say. “I didn’t see any signs saying no pictures, and this isn’t even my destination. I’m headed to Dugway.”

“What’s in Dugway?”

“It’s a military post—”

“I know that. Why do you need to go there? It’s restricted.”

For God’s sake, don’t mention illegal experiments on U.S. soldiers …

“Um, Dugway,” I say cautiously, “is where the government—there was a lawsuit involving these tests done on—well, it’s a really long story, but I pretty much just wanted to see if they have a museum or a post historian I could talk to.”

I go on to explain my trip and that for this part of the journey I’m focusing on crimes and legal cases that have had national ramifications. “What happened at Dugway,” I explain, “prompted a major court fight that—”

He cuts me off as another SUV rolls up. This, I find out, is “the boss.”

“Wait here,” the staff sergeant tells me.

He walks over and the two men start deliberating. The boss is clearly ticked. He keeps shaking his head, while the staff sergeant is shrugging this off as a false alarm.
He’s an idiot, not a threat
is what I’m reading, and I’m perfectly fine with this line of reasoning.

Scowling, the boss gets back into his vehicle, and the staff sergeant walks toward me with his hand out. “Give me your camera.”