Morgan v. Virginia

Morgan v. Virginia
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued March 27, 1946 Decided June 3, 1946
Full case name	Irene Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia
Citations	328 U.S. 373 (more) 66 S. Ct. 1050; 90 L. Ed. 1317
Court membership
Chief Justice vacant Associate Justices Hugo Black · Stanley F. Reed Felix Frankfurter · William O. Douglas Frank Murphy · Robert H. Jackson Wiley B. Rutledge · Harold H. Burton
Case opinions
Majority	Reed, joined by Black, Frankfurter, Douglas, Murphy
Concurrence	Black
Concurrence	Frankfurter
Concurrence	Rutledge
Dissent	Burton
Jackson took no part in the consideration or decision of the case.

Morgan v. Virginia, 328 U.S. 373 (1946), is a major United States Supreme Court case. In this landmark 1946 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 7–1 that Virginia's state law enforcing segregation on interstate buses was unconstitutional.^[1][2]

The case was argued by William H. Hastie, the former governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands and later a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP was co-counsel; he later was appointed as a US Supreme Court justice.^[3] Hastie and Marshall used an innovative strategy to brief and argue the case. Instead of relying upon the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment, they argued successfully that segregation on interstate travel violated the Interstate Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution.^[4] Virginia and other Southern states ignored the ruling, and continued with their practice of enforcing racial segregation in interstate transportation vehicles and facilities.