Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia

Appellant
Irene Morgan
Appellee
Commonwealth of Virginia
Appellant's Claim
That forced segregation on buses traveling between states is unconstitutional.
Chief Lawyers for Appellant
William H. Hastie, Thurgood Marshall
Chief Lawyer for Appellee
Abran P. Staples
Justices for the Court
Hugo Lafayette Black, William O. Douglas, Felix Frankfurter, Frank Murphy, Stanley Forman Reed (writing for the Court), Wiley Blount Rutledge
Justices Dissenting
Harold Burton (Robert H. Jackson and Harlan Fiske Stone did not participate)
Place
Washington, D.C.
Date of Decision
3 June 1946
Decision
Forced racial segregation on buses traveling between states is an impermissible burden on interstate commerce.
Significance
Morgan was a significant step on the road to overturning the rule of "separate by equal" that had been the law of the land ever since Plessy v.Ferguson (1896).
Irene Morgan, an African American woman, got on a Greyhound bus in Glouster County, Virginia, bound for Baltimore, Maryland. Morgan was asked to sit at the back of the bus, as the laws of Virginia dictated she must. When she refused, she was arrested, convicted, and fined ten dollars. When the Supreme Courtof Virginia affirmed her conviction, Morgan appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Morgan was aided in her challenge to Virginia's "Jim Crow" segregation laws by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which had in the 1930s begun a campaign to overturn the "separate but equal" doctrine that permitted such laws to exist. The doctrine originated with Plessy v. Ferguson an infamous 1896 case in which the Supreme Court upheld aLouisiana statute requiring railroads to provide racially segregated rail cars. Over the next six decades it remained the law of the land. "Separate but equal" gained symbolic significance as a multitude of Jim Crow segregation laws were passed, regulating most aspects of public life in the American South.
Like Homer Plessy, Irene Morgan was an African American involved in a test case (Plessy was acting on behalf of the Citizens' Committee to Test the Constitutionality of the Separate Car Act). And like Plessy, Morgan was arrested for refusing to move to the "colored only" section of a public transportation vehicle that was traveling between states. But whereas Plessy and his lawyershad challenged a Jim Crow law on grounds that it violated Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendment prohibitions on racial discrimination, Morgan and her NAACPlawyers (one of them the future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall) based their appeal on the Commerce Clause.
The Commerce Clause appears in Article I, section 8 of the Constitution and grants Congress the power to "regulate Commerce . . . among the several States." The commerce power has proven itself a flexible--and powerful--tool. One of its most effective uses has been in combatting institutionalized racism. Itwas finally codified into law with passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,but by that time it had already been used many times by the Supreme Court asgrounds for overturning discriminatory statutes.
Court Finds that Mandatory Segregation on Public Motor Carriers TravelingBetween States Violates Commerce Clause
As Hastie and Marshall argued, the Court had, before Plessy, used theCommerce Clause to strike down state mandated segregation. In Hall v. DeCuir (1878), a Louisiana statute requiring racial segregation on interstatecommon carriers was struck down as imposing an impermissible burden on interstate commerce. Now, writing for the Court, Justice Reed followed the same logic in overturning the Virginia law:

This statute is attacked on the ground that it imposes undue burdens on interstate commerce . . . Burdensupon commerce are those actions of a state which directly `impair the usefulness of its facilities for such traffic.' [Quoting Illinois Central Railroad v. Illinois (1896)] That impairment, we think, may arise from other causes than costs or delays. A burden may arise from a state statute which requires interstate passengers to order their movement on the vehicle in accordance with local rather than national requirements.

In other words, forcing passengers to reconfigure themselves every time they crossed state lines was unconstitutional.
Morgan effectively overruled Louisiana, New Orleans & Texas Railway Co. v. Mississippi (1890), in which the Court had upheld a state lawvirtually identical to the one struck down several years earlier on CommerceClause grounds in Hall v. DeCuir (1878). Although segregation on buses traveling in the South still occurred after Morgan, this decision made it clear that it was only a matter of time before such practices would beoutlawed everywhere.
Related Cases

• Hall v. DeCuir, 95 U.S. 485 (1878).
  
• Louisiana, New Orleans & Texas Railway Co. v. Mississippi, 133U.S. 587 (1890).
  
• Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896).