On this day, July 16, in 1944

  11 years before Rosa Parks, a 27-year-old black woman named Irene Morgan refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Greyhound bus. The driver stopped the bus in Virginia and summoned the sheriff, who dragged her off the bus. Although Morgan resisted the sheriff, she was eventually arrested and charged for resisting arrest and violating Virginia’s segregation law. Morgan took her case to the Supreme Court, and two years later it was decided that segregation on interstate travel was unconstitutional. Despite this ruling, Southern states refused to accept the desegregation of interstate buses and trains, sparking civil rights campaigns like the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation.