The annual observance of Black History Month, and concurrent understanding that contributions from a large segment of the American population had long been ignored, has paid dividends.

The racial history of our nation springs from unhappy institutions and conflicts. The 20th century did much to remedy past injustice and the great effort continues.

Those are great themes broadly stroked with a wide brush. But it is the little things which spark history.

Little things. Such as a Gloucester woman, a black person, recovering from surgery in 1944, and riding a bus from her homeplace at Hayes back to her own home in Baltimore. The bus stopped at Saluda; she was requested to give up her seat to a white woman; she refused.

Irene Morgan was arrested and jailed. Her case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled Jim Crow laws on interstate transportation illegal. The small thing … a woman riding a bus … became a huge advance in civil rights. Her landmark case came a decade before Rosa Parks’s famous refusal, and went little noticed until the 1990s when some Gloucester people, led by the Rev. Frederick Carter, brought light to it again.

Irene Morgan lived to receive presidential recognition and praise for her brave and defiant action in Middlesex County half a century earlier. And recently, the state has ordered her landmark case to be memorialized on a roadside marker in Middlesex. She’s also just been honored as one of the Library of Virginia’s 2012 African American Trailblazers.

What other actions, what other noble Americans, are hidden in our past? Black History Month is just one mechanism by which to shine the light on our local heroes.