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08/15/2007: "Eleven years before Rosa, there was..."

Irene Morgan Kirkaldy, 90, who died of Alzheimer's disease Aug. 10
at her home in Gloucester, Va., quietly changed history in 1944
when she refused to give up her seat on a crowded Greyhound bus
to a white couple. Her case resulted in a landmark U.S. Supreme
Court decision outlawing segregation in interstate transportation
and sparked the first Freedom Ride in 1947.

Mrs. Kirkaldy's defiance of the discriminatory Jim Crow laws of
Virginia came 11 years before Rosa Parks's similar act in Montgomery,
Ala., galvanized the civil rights movement and made her a national icon.