Overlooked Civil Rights Pioneer Dies at 90

I read today via Rational Review News Digest of the death of Irene Morgan Kirkaldy, a woman who refused to give up her bus seat a decade prior to Rosa Parks' more famous act of civil disobedience. I'd never heard of Kirkaldy's act, which occurred on a Greyhound bus from Gloucester to Baltimore in 1944. She was arrested for not giving up her seat to a white couple and for resisting arrest. The former charge was appealed -- she willingly paid the $100 fine for resisting because she kicked the officer who tried to remove her, saying "Sometimes you are so enraged, you don't have time to be afraid" -- and the U. S. Supreme Court in 1946 struck down the Virginia law that mandated racial separation on buses as an invalid interference in interstate commerce. Kirkaldy was represented by an NAACP lawyer named Thurgood Marshall, later to become a Supreme Court justice himself.

Kirkaldy died last Friday at age 90 at her daughter's home. Her case did not get the notoriety that Rosa Parks' case did, but it led to the first Freedom Ride in 1947, where 16 civil rights activists rode buses and trains in the South testing the Supreme Court decision, and eventually to Parks' famous act in 1955. President Bill Clinton gave Kirkaldy the Presidential Citizens Medal in 2001, the second highest civilian honor a president can bestow. Asked where her courage to not change her seat came from, she is quoted as saying "I can't understand how anyone would have done otherwise."

In an age where courage in the face of governmental power has been lacking until lately, Kirkaldy's passing deserves notice and her actions deserve spotlight.