One who belongs to the most vilified and persecuted minority in history is not likely to be insensible to the freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution. Were my purely personal attitude relevant, I should wholeheartedly associate myself with the general libertarian views in the Court’s opinion, representing, as they do, the thought and action of a lifetime. But, as judges, we are neither Jew nor Gentile, neither Catholic nor agnostic. We owe equal attachment to the Constitution.
Frankfurter went on to stress his firm belief in judicial self-restraint, that the Supreme Court should not behave like “a super-legislature” subverting elected officials and the people’s will. “Before a duly enacted law can be judicially nullified,” he wrote, “it must be forbidden by some explicit restriction upon political authority in the Constitution.” Requiring students to affirm their allegiance to America did not, he believed, run counter to any such restriction.
Ultimately Frankfurter’s arguments lost out, and with newcomer Wiley Rutledge joining the majority, Gobitis was overturned 6–3. By sheer coincidence, the decision was announced on June 14—Flag Day. After visiting Slip Hill, I phone Marie to ask her what happened when she heard the news.
“Where were you when you found out that you’d won the case?”
“Our lawyers called my dad, and he told us. We never went to the Supreme Court ourselves. I’m not sure at that age I even knew much about it. We hadn’t gotten to that part of our schooling then.”
“What’s it like knowing you’re part of a historic ruling like that?”
“I’m proud we stood up for our rights. I hope it paved the way for others, so they wouldn’t have to go through what we did.”
The two Barnett sisters went back to school, where they were top students. Marie eventually worked for an insurance company while also raising four children. She now has seven grandchildren and thirteen great-grandchildren.
“In retrospect would you do it all again?”
“Absolutely,” she says.
I don’t know if she’ll take this as bad news or not, but I tell her the school isn’t there anymore. “I did, however, find some small pieces of red bricks scattered about and picked up a few as keepsakes. I’d be happy to send you some, if you’re interested.” Since my earlier mention of the building didn’t elicit positive memories, I expect Marie to say no.
“That would be nice. Thank you.”
Of course, I’m the one indebted to Marie for sharing her memories, which shed light on a Supreme Court ruling I knew almost nothing about and, indirectly, introduced me to the surprising evolution of the Pledge of Allegiance itself.
The original 1892 version was first published in a wildly popular magazine called The Youth’s Companion, and it made no mention of God; Francis Bellamy, the socialist minister who authored it, initially wrote: “I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands: one Nation indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all.” And while Bellamy was by all accounts a patriotic man, creating a “Pledge of Allegiance” was the brainstorm of The Youth’s Companion’s promotional wizard, James Upham.
Several weeks later, Bellamy added a “to” before “the Republic” because he thought it sounded better. In 1923 “my Flag” was altered to “the flag of the United States” and “of America” was tacked on a year later.
In 1942 a major change was made to the gesture that accompanied the Pledge. Traditionally, after students recited the words, they stretched their right arm straight out and at a raised angle, giving what was known as “the Bellamy salute.” Small problem: This looked awfully Nazi-ish, so students were encouraged to place their hands over their heart instead.
“Under God” was included by an act of Congress in 1954. President Dwight D. Eisenhower enthusiastically signed the bill and proclaimed that the new addition would “strengthen those spiritual weapons which forever will be our country’s most powerful resource, in peace or in war.” Ike’s words were a verbal volley aimed directly at the Soviet Union and “godless communists” everywhere.
Francis Bellamy had considered including “equality” along with “liberty and justice for all” in the original Pledge, but decided that in an era—the late nineteenth century—when segregation and other forms of racial discrimination were legal, the United States wasn’t ready for something so radical.
Almost two generations later, during World War II, millions of minority troops were risking their lives overseas fighting for freedoms denied to them back home, prompting both black and white Americans to ask with growing impatience when their country would be ready to embrace equal rights. And some, like the woman whose spontaneous act of defiance against segregation would bring me to an old jailhouse in the South, were refusing to wait any longer.
SALUDA COUNTY JAIL
People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.
—From My Story (1992) by Rosa Parks
AN AFRICAN AMERICAN woman riding on a bus is told to relinquish her seat for a white passenger. She says no. The driver warns her that if she doesn’t move, she’ll be arrested. The woman stays put, and the driver summons local police, who throw her in jail. Her case sparks a lawsuit that eventually helps bring an end to de jure discrimination on buses across the country and galvanizes early civil rights advocates. To the general public, however, she remains virtually unknown.
Her name was Irene Morgan, and on July 16, 1944, she boarded a Maryland-bound Greyhound Bus in Gloucester, Virginia. Twenty-seven years old, Morgan had suffered a miscarriage a few days earlier and scheduled an appointment with her family doctor back in Baltimore, where she had been raised. Morgan sat four rows from the rear in the “Colored” section and was minding her own business when the bus stopped just outside of Saluda, Virginia, to pick up a white couple. No empty seats were available, so the driver ordered Morgan onto her feet. Feeling ill and not wanting to stand the remainder of the trip, she wouldn’t budge. “This is my seat,” Morgan said. “Why should I?”
Upon entering Saluda, the driver pulled over and called the sheriff. An officer came onto the bus and issued Morgan a warrant, which she ripped up and tossed out the window. At that point a deputy grabbed her, causing Morgan to kick him, she later recounted, “in a very bad place.” Then, she said: “He hobbled off, and another one came on. He was trying to put his hands on me to get me off. I was going to bite him, but he was dirty, so I clawed him instead. I ripped his shirt. We were both pulling at each other. He said he’d use his nightstick. I said, ‘We’ll whip each other.’ ”
Forcibly dragged out of the bus and onto the street, Morgan was locked up in Saluda’s jail. All of this occurred eleven years before Rosa Parks famously refused to surrender her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama.
“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.
Such regulation hampers freedom of choice in selecting accommodations. The recent changes in transportation brought about by the coming of automobiles does not seem of great significance in the problem. People of all races travel today more extensively than in 1878, when this Court first passed upon state regulation of racial segregation in commerce.
… It seems clear to us that seating arrangements for the different races in interstate motor travel require a single uniform rule to promote and protect national travel.
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.”
JAMES JOHNSON’S LANDING SPOT (VIA THE DESERET CHEMICAL DEPOT)
WE HAVE A GRENADE, THE PIN HAS BEEN PULLED. WE HAVE PISTOLS, THEY’RE LOADED. WE HAVE C-4 PLASTIC EXPLOSIVES. IT’S A LONG WAY TO THE GROUND.
WE ARE TAKING THIS PLANE TO SAN FRANCISCO, NOT
LOS ANGELES! SECURE PERMISSION TO LAND ON RUNWAY 19, AT EXACTLY 4:30 P.M.… WE WANT $500,000 IN CASH—DIFFERENT DENOMINATIONS. FOUR COMMANDER PARACHUTES WITH STOPWATCH AND WRIST ALTIMETER.… DON’T TELL THE PASSENGERS WHAT’S GOING ON.
—From a hijacking note written on April 7, 1972, to the captain of United Flight 855 by a passenger listed as James Johnson
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.
Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History Page 17
