Editor, Gazette-Journal:

In a recent ceremony at Hayes, a new, historic marker was unveiled. It commemorates the personal courage of a 27-year-old black woman, Irene Morgan, who, in 1944, boarded a Greyhound bus at Hayes Store bound for Baltimore. She had recently suffered a miscarriage and had left her children with her mother in Gloucester while she returned to her home in Baltimore to see her doctor.

As has been reflected in the Gazette-Journal’s coverage of the event, she was commanded to give up her seat on the bus to a white person when the bus reached Saluda, and when she refused, she was arrested and charged with violating a Virginia statute, then in effect, that mandated segregation on interstate buses. She was represented by the NAACP and her case was argued before the Supreme Court of the United States by Thurgood Marshall, then the NAACP’s general counsel; he would later be appointed to the Court himself by President Lyndon Johnson.

In 1946, the Court upheld her challenge by a split vote of 7-1, declaring the Virginia law unconstitutional.

Irene Morgan’s solitary act of courage was truly remarkable, especially for 1944, when World War II was still raging in Europe and the Pacific. But history bypassed her when, 11 years later, 47-year-old Rosa Parks similarly refused to give up her seat on a municipal bus to a white person and a 26-year-old Baptist minister named Martin Luther King Jr. used her refusal to trigger the start of the Montgomery (Alabama) Bus Boycott of 1955.

Gloucester’s byways are proudly dotted with historical markers of all kinds, and across the street from the one commemorating Irene Morgan is another commemorating a revolutionary battle, called the Battle of the Hook. Near that spot, on Oct. 3, 1781, American and French forces defeated British efforts to establish an escape route that British General Lord Charles Cornwallis had hoped would allow him to avoid the defeat at Yorktown that came 16 days later. The road beside that spot has been named Hook Road.

To me, it only seems fitting that, in the wake of the recent recognition of Irene Morgan’s equally historic achievement, old Route 17, now named Hayes Road, should be renamed Irene Morgan Memorial Road. Her historic Supreme Court precedent, Morgan v. Virginia, set the stage for Dr. King’s success before the Court more than a decade later, and for that we should all be justly proud.

Thomas M. Boyd

Washington, D.C. and Gloucester, Va.