Civil rights activist Amelia Boynton was born Amelia Platts on August 18, 1911, to George and Anna Platts of Savannah, Georgia. Both of her parents were of African-American, Cherokee Indian and German descent. They had 10 children and made going to church central to their upbringing.
Boynton spent her first two years of college at Georgia State College (now Savannah State University), then transferred to the Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) in Alabama. She graduated from Tuskegee with a home economics degree before further pursuing her education at Tennessee State University, Virginia State University and Temple University.
After working as a teacher in Georgia, Boynton took a job as Dallas County's home demonstration agent with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Selma, Alabama. In 1930, she met her co-worker, Dallas County extension agent Samuel Boynton. The two had in common their impassioned desire to better the lives of African-American members of their community, particularly sharecroppers. The couple married in 1936 and had two sons, Bill Jr. and Bruce Carver. Samuel died in 1963, but Amelia continued their commitment to improving the lives of African Americans.
She remarried in 1969, to a musician named Bob W. Billups. He died unexpectedly in a boating accident in 1973. Boynton eventually married a third time, to former Tuskegee classmate James Robinson, and moved back to Tuskegee after the wedding. When Robinson died in 1988, Boynton stayed in Tuskegee.
After suffering several strokes, Mrs.Boynton Robinson died on August 26, 2015 at the age of 104. Her son Bruce Boynton said of his mother's commitment to civil rights: "The truth of it is that was her entire life. That's what she was completely taken with. She was a loving person, very supportive — but civil rights was her life."∼American Civil Rights leader.
∼Civil Right Activast. Born in 1911 she was one of ten children. Her family encouraged the children to learn to read and write. Amelia attended two years at Georgia State College (now Savannah State University). She transferred to Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University), earning a degree in home economics. Platts taught in Georgia before starting with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in Selma as the home demonstration agent for Dallas County. She educated the county's largely rural population about food production and processing, nutrition, healthcare, and other subjects related to agriculture and homemaking. In 1934 she registered to vote, which was extremely difficult for African Americans to accomplish in Alabama. While working at the USDA she met her future husband Samuel W. Boynton. They married in 1936. In 1954 the Boyntons met Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and his wife Coretta Scott King at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, where King was the pastor. After her husband s death in 1963 Boynton worked with Martin Luther King, James Bevel, and others of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to plan demonstrations for civil and voting rights from 1964 and 1965. To protest continuing segregation of blacks, in early 1965 Amelia Boynton helped organize a march to the state capital of Montgomery, initiated by James Bevel, which took place on March 7, 1965. Led by John Lewis around 600 protesters including Rosa Parks along with other civil rights leaders arrived to participate in the event which would become known "Bloody Sunday" when county and state police stopped the march and beat demonstrators after they left the Edmund Pettus Bridge and crossed into the county. Boynton was beaten unconscious; a photograph of her lying on Edmund Pettus Bridge went around the world. Boynton remarried in 1969, to a musician named Bob W. Billups. He died unexpectedly in a boating accident in 1973. Amelia Boynton eventually married again to a former Tuskegee classmate James Robinson. She moved with him to Tuskegee after the wedding. James Robinson died in 1988. Robinson worked for civil right for the rest of her life and in 1990, Boynton won the Martin Luther King Jr. Medal of Freedom. In 2014, the Selma City Council renamed five blocks of Lapsley Street as Boyntons Street to honor Amelia Boynton Robinson and Sam Boynton. In 2015, Robinson attended the State of the Union Address at the invitation of President Barack Obama, and, in her wheelchair, was at Obama's side as he and others walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge during the Selma Voting Rights Movement 50th anniversary Jubilee in March of 2015.∼Amelia Boynton Robinson, a Pivotal Figure at the Selma March, Dies at 104
By MARGALIT FOX
AUG. 26, 2015
Amelia Boynton Robinson, who was called the matriarch of the voting rights movement — and whose photograph, showing her beaten, gassed and left for dead in the epochal civil rights march known as Bloody Sunday, appeared in newspapers and magazines round the world in 1965 — died on Wednesday in Montgomery, Ala. She was 104.
Her death was confirmed by Shawn Eckles, a family spokesman.
Mrs. Boynton Robinson was one of the organizers of the march, the first of three attempts by demonstrators in March 1965 to walk the 54 miles from Selma, Ala., to the capital, Montgomery, to demand the right to register to vote.
As shown in "Selma," the Oscar-nominated 2014 film directed by Ava DuVernay, Mrs. Boynton Robinson (played by Lorraine Toussaint) had helped persuade the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who would lead the second and third marches, to concentrate his efforts in that city.
Bloody Sunday took place on March 7, 1965. As they tried to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, some 600 black demonstrators, led by John Lewis and the Rev. Hosea Williams, were set upon by Alabama state troopers armed with tear gas, billy clubs and whips.
Walking near the front of the line and subject to the full force of the troopers' blows, Mrs. Boynton Robinson, then known as Amelia Boynton, was knocked unconscious. One widely reproduced press photograph shows her lying insensible on the ground with a white officer standing over her, nightstick in hand. Another shows a fellow marcher taking her in his arms and struggling to lift her up.
News coverage of Bloody Sunday — in which at least 17 demonstrators, including Mrs. Boynton Robinson, were hospitalized — was considered pivotal in winning wide popular support for the civil rights movement. After her release, Mrs. Boynton Robinson was a guest of honor at the White House on Aug. 6, 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the federal Voting Rights Act into law, an event seen as a direct consequence of the marches.
"She was as strong, as hopeful and as indomitable of spirit — as quintessentially American — as I'm sure she was that day 50 years ago," President Obama said in a statement on Wednesday. "To honor the legacy of an American hero like Amelia Boynton requires only that we follow her example — that all of us fight to protect everyone's right to vote."
Mrs. Boynton Robinson, who had worked to register Southern black voters since the 1930s and in 1964 ran unsuccessfully for Congress from Alabama, remained involved in civil rights advocacy to the end of her life. On March 7 of this year, as part of the 50th-anniversary commemoration of Bloody Sunday, Mrs. Boynton Robinson, using a wheelchair, held hands with Mr. Obama as they traversed the Edmund Pettus Bridge together.
One of 10 children of George Platts, a building contractor, and the former Anna Eliza Hicks, Amelia Platts was born in Savannah, Ga., on Aug. 18, 1911. As a child, before the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920 gave women the vote, she traveled with her mother by horse and buggy to pass out leaflets advocating women's suffrage.
At 14, Amelia entered what was then the Georgia State Industrial College for Colored Youth and is now Savannah State University. She later transferred to the Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University), where she studied under the renowned botanist George Washington Carver and earned a degree in home economics.
She then took a job as a demonstration agent with the United States Department of Agriculture. Working in Dallas County, Ala., of which Selma is the seat, she gave instruction in food, nutrition and homemaking in rural households throughout the county.
With her husband, Samuel William Boynton, whom she married in 1936, she spent decades attempting to register black voters in Alabama. Despite nearly insurmountable odds, including prohibitive examinations designed to deter black aspirants, she had managed to register there herself in the early '30s.
Mr. Boynton died in 1963, and the next year, Mrs. Boynton Robinson ran for Congress from Alabama. She was the first black person since Reconstruction, and the first black woman ever, to do so. She received about 10 percent of the vote, a noteworthy figure given how few African-Americans were registered in her district at the time.
Edward Hershey
"Every time another of these heroes and heroines dies — and we have seen several go in the recent past — it underscores what a cruel betrayal..."
Mrs. Boynton Robinson, who had met Dr. King in 1954 and been involved with the work of his Southern Christian Leadership Conference ever since, had long opened her house in Selma as a meeting ground for civil rights leaders in the area. The Selma-to-Montgomery marches were planned there, and an early draft of the Voting Rights Act was written there.
In later years, Mrs. Boynton Robinson incurred criticism for her association with Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr., a former Marxist activist who came increasingly to be considered a member of the right-wing fringe. (Mr. LaRouche served time in prison after being convicted in 1988 on charges including mail fraud and conspiring to defraud the Internal Revenue Service.)
For years, until her retirement in 2009, Mrs. Boynton Robinson served on the board of the Schiller Institute, a think tank founded in the 1980s and closely associated with Mr. LaRouche. Her memoir, "Bridge Across Jordan," was reprinted by the institute in 1991.
Mrs. Boynton Robinson also made headlines in 2004 when she lost a multimillion-dollar defamation suit against ABC and the Walt Disney Company over the 1999 television film "Selma, Lord, Selma." She charged that the film depicted her as an "Aunt Jemima" who sang gospel songs and spoke in a stereotyped dialect. (She had nothing but praise for Ms. DuVernay's film.)
At her death, Mrs. Boynton Robinson lived in Tuskegee, Ala. Her second husband, Bob W. Billups, died in 1973; her third husband, James Robinson, died in 1988. A son, Bill Boynton Jr., died last year. Survivors include another son, Bruce Carver Boynton, whose godfather was George Washington Carver, and a granddaughter.
Among her laurels is the Martin Luther King Jr. Freedom Medal, which she received in 1990.
In an interview with The New York Post in December, Mrs. Boynton Robinson reflected on the events of Bloody Sunday and the long road since.
"I wasn't looking for notoriety," she said. "But if that's what it took," she added, "I didn't care how many licks I got. It just made me even more determined to fight for our cause."
A version of this article appears in print on August 27, 2015, on page B17 of the New York edition with the headline: Amelia Boynton Robinson, 104, Dies; A Pivotal Figure at the Selma March .
Boynton spent her first two years of college at Georgia State College (now Savannah State University), then transferred to the Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) in Alabama. She graduated from Tuskegee with a home economics degree before further pursuing her education at Tennessee State University, Virginia State University and Temple University.
After working as a teacher in Georgia, Boynton took a job as Dallas County's home demonstration agent with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Selma, Alabama. In 1930, she met her co-worker, Dallas County extension agent Samuel Boynton. The two had in common their impassioned desire to better the lives of African-American members of their community, particularly sharecroppers. The couple married in 1936 and had two sons, Bill Jr. and Bruce Carver. Samuel died in 1963, but Amelia continued their commitment to improving the lives of African Americans.
She remarried in 1969, to a musician named Bob W. Billups. He died unexpectedly in a boating accident in 1973. Boynton eventually married a third time, to former Tuskegee classmate James Robinson, and moved back to Tuskegee after the wedding. When Robinson died in 1988, Boynton stayed in Tuskegee.
After suffering several strokes, Mrs.Boynton Robinson died on August 26, 2015 at the age of 104. Her son Bruce Boynton said of his mother's commitment to civil rights: "The truth of it is that was her entire life. That's what she was completely taken with. She was a loving person, very supportive — but civil rights was her life."∼American Civil Rights leader.
∼Civil Right Activast. Born in 1911 she was one of ten children. Her family encouraged the children to learn to read and write. Amelia attended two years at Georgia State College (now Savannah State University). She transferred to Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University), earning a degree in home economics. Platts taught in Georgia before starting with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in Selma as the home demonstration agent for Dallas County. She educated the county's largely rural population about food production and processing, nutrition, healthcare, and other subjects related to agriculture and homemaking. In 1934 she registered to vote, which was extremely difficult for African Americans to accomplish in Alabama. While working at the USDA she met her future husband Samuel W. Boynton. They married in 1936. In 1954 the Boyntons met Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and his wife Coretta Scott King at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, where King was the pastor. After her husband s death in 1963 Boynton worked with Martin Luther King, James Bevel, and others of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to plan demonstrations for civil and voting rights from 1964 and 1965. To protest continuing segregation of blacks, in early 1965 Amelia Boynton helped organize a march to the state capital of Montgomery, initiated by James Bevel, which took place on March 7, 1965. Led by John Lewis around 600 protesters including Rosa Parks along with other civil rights leaders arrived to participate in the event which would become known "Bloody Sunday" when county and state police stopped the march and beat demonstrators after they left the Edmund Pettus Bridge and crossed into the county. Boynton was beaten unconscious; a photograph of her lying on Edmund Pettus Bridge went around the world. Boynton remarried in 1969, to a musician named Bob W. Billups. He died unexpectedly in a boating accident in 1973. Amelia Boynton eventually married again to a former Tuskegee classmate James Robinson. She moved with him to Tuskegee after the wedding. James Robinson died in 1988. Robinson worked for civil right for the rest of her life and in 1990, Boynton won the Martin Luther King Jr. Medal of Freedom. In 2014, the Selma City Council renamed five blocks of Lapsley Street as Boyntons Street to honor Amelia Boynton Robinson and Sam Boynton. In 2015, Robinson attended the State of the Union Address at the invitation of President Barack Obama, and, in her wheelchair, was at Obama's side as he and others walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge during the Selma Voting Rights Movement 50th anniversary Jubilee in March of 2015.∼Amelia Boynton Robinson, a Pivotal Figure at the Selma March, Dies at 104
By MARGALIT FOX
AUG. 26, 2015
Amelia Boynton Robinson, who was called the matriarch of the voting rights movement — and whose photograph, showing her beaten, gassed and left for dead in the epochal civil rights march known as Bloody Sunday, appeared in newspapers and magazines round the world in 1965 — died on Wednesday in Montgomery, Ala. She was 104.
Her death was confirmed by Shawn Eckles, a family spokesman.
Mrs. Boynton Robinson was one of the organizers of the march, the first of three attempts by demonstrators in March 1965 to walk the 54 miles from Selma, Ala., to the capital, Montgomery, to demand the right to register to vote.
As shown in "Selma," the Oscar-nominated 2014 film directed by Ava DuVernay, Mrs. Boynton Robinson (played by Lorraine Toussaint) had helped persuade the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who would lead the second and third marches, to concentrate his efforts in that city.
Bloody Sunday took place on March 7, 1965. As they tried to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, some 600 black demonstrators, led by John Lewis and the Rev. Hosea Williams, were set upon by Alabama state troopers armed with tear gas, billy clubs and whips.
Walking near the front of the line and subject to the full force of the troopers' blows, Mrs. Boynton Robinson, then known as Amelia Boynton, was knocked unconscious. One widely reproduced press photograph shows her lying insensible on the ground with a white officer standing over her, nightstick in hand. Another shows a fellow marcher taking her in his arms and struggling to lift her up.
News coverage of Bloody Sunday — in which at least 17 demonstrators, including Mrs. Boynton Robinson, were hospitalized — was considered pivotal in winning wide popular support for the civil rights movement. After her release, Mrs. Boynton Robinson was a guest of honor at the White House on Aug. 6, 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the federal Voting Rights Act into law, an event seen as a direct consequence of the marches.
"She was as strong, as hopeful and as indomitable of spirit — as quintessentially American — as I'm sure she was that day 50 years ago," President Obama said in a statement on Wednesday. "To honor the legacy of an American hero like Amelia Boynton requires only that we follow her example — that all of us fight to protect everyone's right to vote."
Mrs. Boynton Robinson, who had worked to register Southern black voters since the 1930s and in 1964 ran unsuccessfully for Congress from Alabama, remained involved in civil rights advocacy to the end of her life. On March 7 of this year, as part of the 50th-anniversary commemoration of Bloody Sunday, Mrs. Boynton Robinson, using a wheelchair, held hands with Mr. Obama as they traversed the Edmund Pettus Bridge together.
One of 10 children of George Platts, a building contractor, and the former Anna Eliza Hicks, Amelia Platts was born in Savannah, Ga., on Aug. 18, 1911. As a child, before the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920 gave women the vote, she traveled with her mother by horse and buggy to pass out leaflets advocating women's suffrage.
At 14, Amelia entered what was then the Georgia State Industrial College for Colored Youth and is now Savannah State University. She later transferred to the Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University), where she studied under the renowned botanist George Washington Carver and earned a degree in home economics.
She then took a job as a demonstration agent with the United States Department of Agriculture. Working in Dallas County, Ala., of which Selma is the seat, she gave instruction in food, nutrition and homemaking in rural households throughout the county.
With her husband, Samuel William Boynton, whom she married in 1936, she spent decades attempting to register black voters in Alabama. Despite nearly insurmountable odds, including prohibitive examinations designed to deter black aspirants, she had managed to register there herself in the early '30s.
Mr. Boynton died in 1963, and the next year, Mrs. Boynton Robinson ran for Congress from Alabama. She was the first black person since Reconstruction, and the first black woman ever, to do so. She received about 10 percent of the vote, a noteworthy figure given how few African-Americans were registered in her district at the time.
Edward Hershey
"Every time another of these heroes and heroines dies — and we have seen several go in the recent past — it underscores what a cruel betrayal..."
Mrs. Boynton Robinson, who had met Dr. King in 1954 and been involved with the work of his Southern Christian Leadership Conference ever since, had long opened her house in Selma as a meeting ground for civil rights leaders in the area. The Selma-to-Montgomery marches were planned there, and an early draft of the Voting Rights Act was written there.
In later years, Mrs. Boynton Robinson incurred criticism for her association with Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr., a former Marxist activist who came increasingly to be considered a member of the right-wing fringe. (Mr. LaRouche served time in prison after being convicted in 1988 on charges including mail fraud and conspiring to defraud the Internal Revenue Service.)
For years, until her retirement in 2009, Mrs. Boynton Robinson served on the board of the Schiller Institute, a think tank founded in the 1980s and closely associated with Mr. LaRouche. Her memoir, "Bridge Across Jordan," was reprinted by the institute in 1991.
Mrs. Boynton Robinson also made headlines in 2004 when she lost a multimillion-dollar defamation suit against ABC and the Walt Disney Company over the 1999 television film "Selma, Lord, Selma." She charged that the film depicted her as an "Aunt Jemima" who sang gospel songs and spoke in a stereotyped dialect. (She had nothing but praise for Ms. DuVernay's film.)
At her death, Mrs. Boynton Robinson lived in Tuskegee, Ala. Her second husband, Bob W. Billups, died in 1973; her third husband, James Robinson, died in 1988. A son, Bill Boynton Jr., died last year. Survivors include another son, Bruce Carver Boynton, whose godfather was George Washington Carver, and a granddaughter.
Among her laurels is the Martin Luther King Jr. Freedom Medal, which she received in 1990.
In an interview with The New York Post in December, Mrs. Boynton Robinson reflected on the events of Bloody Sunday and the long road since.
"I wasn't looking for notoriety," she said. "But if that's what it took," she added, "I didn't care how many licks I got. It just made me even more determined to fight for our cause."
A version of this article appears in print on August 27, 2015, on page B17 of the New York edition with the headline: Amelia Boynton Robinson, 104, Dies; A Pivotal Figure at the Selma March .
Civil rights activist Amelia Boynton was born Amelia Platts on August 18, 1911, to George and Anna Platts of Savannah, Georgia. Both of her parents were of African-American, Cherokee Indian and German descent. They had 10 children and made going to church central to their upbringing.
Boynton spent her first two years of college at Georgia State College (now Savannah State University), then transferred to the Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) in Alabama. She graduated from Tuskegee with a home economics degree before further pursuing her education at Tennessee State University, Virginia State University and Temple University.
After working as a teacher in Georgia, Boynton took a job as Dallas County's home demonstration agent with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Selma, Alabama. In 1930, she met her co-worker, Dallas County extension agent Samuel Boynton. The two had in common their impassioned desire to better the lives of African-American members of their community, particularly sharecroppers. The couple married in 1936 and had two sons, Bill Jr. and Bruce Carver. Samuel died in 1963, but Amelia continued their commitment to improving the lives of African Americans.
She remarried in 1969, to a musician named Bob W. Billups. He died unexpectedly in a boating accident in 1973. Boynton eventually married a third time, to former Tuskegee classmate James Robinson, and moved back to Tuskegee after the wedding. When Robinson died in 1988, Boynton stayed in Tuskegee.
After suffering several strokes, Mrs.Boynton Robinson died on August 26, 2015 at the age of 104. Her son Bruce Boynton said of his mother's commitment to civil rights: "The truth of it is that was her entire life. That's what she was completely taken with. She was a loving person, very supportive — but civil rights was her life."∼American Civil Rights leader.
∼Civil Right Activast. Born in 1911 she was one of ten children. Her family encouraged the children to learn to read and write. Amelia attended two years at Georgia State College (now Savannah State University). She transferred to Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University), earning a degree in home economics. Platts taught in Georgia before starting with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in Selma as the home demonstration agent for Dallas County. She educated the county's largely rural population about food production and processing, nutrition, healthcare, and other subjects related to agriculture and homemaking. In 1934 she registered to vote, which was extremely difficult for African Americans to accomplish in Alabama. While working at the USDA she met her future husband Samuel W. Boynton. They married in 1936. In 1954 the Boyntons met Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and his wife Coretta Scott King at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, where King was the pastor. After her husband s death in 1963 Boynton worked with Martin Luther King, James Bevel, and others of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to plan demonstrations for civil and voting rights from 1964 and 1965. To protest continuing segregation of blacks, in early 1965 Amelia Boynton helped organize a march to the state capital of Montgomery, initiated by James Bevel, which took place on March 7, 1965. Led by John Lewis around 600 protesters including Rosa Parks along with other civil rights leaders arrived to participate in the event which would become known "Bloody Sunday" when county and state police stopped the march and beat demonstrators after they left the Edmund Pettus Bridge and crossed into the county. Boynton was beaten unconscious; a photograph of her lying on Edmund Pettus Bridge went around the world. Boynton remarried in 1969, to a musician named Bob W. Billups. He died unexpectedly in a boating accident in 1973. Amelia Boynton eventually married again to a former Tuskegee classmate James Robinson. She moved with him to Tuskegee after the wedding. James Robinson died in 1988. Robinson worked for civil right for the rest of her life and in 1990, Boynton won the Martin Luther King Jr. Medal of Freedom. In 2014, the Selma City Council renamed five blocks of Lapsley Street as Boyntons Street to honor Amelia Boynton Robinson and Sam Boynton. In 2015, Robinson attended the State of the Union Address at the invitation of President Barack Obama, and, in her wheelchair, was at Obama's side as he and others walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge during the Selma Voting Rights Movement 50th anniversary Jubilee in March of 2015.∼Amelia Boynton Robinson, a Pivotal Figure at the Selma March, Dies at 104
By MARGALIT FOX
AUG. 26, 2015
Amelia Boynton Robinson, who was called the matriarch of the voting rights movement — and whose photograph, showing her beaten, gassed and left for dead in the epochal civil rights march known as Bloody Sunday, appeared in newspapers and magazines round the world in 1965 — died on Wednesday in Montgomery, Ala. She was 104.
Her death was confirmed by Shawn Eckles, a family spokesman.
Mrs. Boynton Robinson was one of the organizers of the march, the first of three attempts by demonstrators in March 1965 to walk the 54 miles from Selma, Ala., to the capital, Montgomery, to demand the right to register to vote.
As shown in "Selma," the Oscar-nominated 2014 film directed by Ava DuVernay, Mrs. Boynton Robinson (played by Lorraine Toussaint) had helped persuade the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who would lead the second and third marches, to concentrate his efforts in that city.
Bloody Sunday took place on March 7, 1965. As they tried to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, some 600 black demonstrators, led by John Lewis and the Rev. Hosea Williams, were set upon by Alabama state troopers armed with tear gas, billy clubs and whips.
Walking near the front of the line and subject to the full force of the troopers' blows, Mrs. Boynton Robinson, then known as Amelia Boynton, was knocked unconscious. One widely reproduced press photograph shows her lying insensible on the ground with a white officer standing over her, nightstick in hand. Another shows a fellow marcher taking her in his arms and struggling to lift her up.
News coverage of Bloody Sunday — in which at least 17 demonstrators, including Mrs. Boynton Robinson, were hospitalized — was considered pivotal in winning wide popular support for the civil rights movement. After her release, Mrs. Boynton Robinson was a guest of honor at the White House on Aug. 6, 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the federal Voting Rights Act into law, an event seen as a direct consequence of the marches.
"She was as strong, as hopeful and as indomitable of spirit — as quintessentially American — as I'm sure she was that day 50 years ago," President Obama said in a statement on Wednesday. "To honor the legacy of an American hero like Amelia Boynton requires only that we follow her example — that all of us fight to protect everyone's right to vote."
Mrs. Boynton Robinson, who had worked to register Southern black voters since the 1930s and in 1964 ran unsuccessfully for Congress from Alabama, remained involved in civil rights advocacy to the end of her life. On March 7 of this year, as part of the 50th-anniversary commemoration of Bloody Sunday, Mrs. Boynton Robinson, using a wheelchair, held hands with Mr. Obama as they traversed the Edmund Pettus Bridge together.
One of 10 children of George Platts, a building contractor, and the former Anna Eliza Hicks, Amelia Platts was born in Savannah, Ga., on Aug. 18, 1911. As a child, before the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920 gave women the vote, she traveled with her mother by horse and buggy to pass out leaflets advocating women's suffrage.
At 14, Amelia entered what was then the Georgia State Industrial College for Colored Youth and is now Savannah State University. She later transferred to the Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University), where she studied under the renowned botanist George Washington Carver and earned a degree in home economics.
She then took a job as a demonstration agent with the United States Department of Agriculture. Working in Dallas County, Ala., of which Selma is the seat, she gave instruction in food, nutrition and homemaking in rural households throughout the county.
With her husband, Samuel William Boynton, whom she married in 1936, she spent decades attempting to register black voters in Alabama. Despite nearly insurmountable odds, including prohibitive examinations designed to deter black aspirants, she had managed to register there herself in the early '30s.
Mr. Boynton died in 1963, and the next year, Mrs. Boynton Robinson ran for Congress from Alabama. She was the first black person since Reconstruction, and the first black woman ever, to do so. She received about 10 percent of the vote, a noteworthy figure given how few African-Americans were registered in her district at the time.
Edward Hershey
"Every time another of these heroes and heroines dies — and we have seen several go in the recent past — it underscores what a cruel betrayal..."
Mrs. Boynton Robinson, who had met Dr. King in 1954 and been involved with the work of his Southern Christian Leadership Conference ever since, had long opened her house in Selma as a meeting ground for civil rights leaders in the area. The Selma-to-Montgomery marches were planned there, and an early draft of the Voting Rights Act was written there.
In later years, Mrs. Boynton Robinson incurred criticism for her association with Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr., a former Marxist activist who came increasingly to be considered a member of the right-wing fringe. (Mr. LaRouche served time in prison after being convicted in 1988 on charges including mail fraud and conspiring to defraud the Internal Revenue Service.)
For years, until her retirement in 2009, Mrs. Boynton Robinson served on the board of the Schiller Institute, a think tank founded in the 1980s and closely associated with Mr. LaRouche. Her memoir, "Bridge Across Jordan," was reprinted by the institute in 1991.
Mrs. Boynton Robinson also made headlines in 2004 when she lost a multimillion-dollar defamation suit against ABC and the Walt Disney Company over the 1999 television film "Selma, Lord, Selma." She charged that the film depicted her as an "Aunt Jemima" who sang gospel songs and spoke in a stereotyped dialect. (She had nothing but praise for Ms. DuVernay's film.)
At her death, Mrs. Boynton Robinson lived in Tuskegee, Ala. Her second husband, Bob W. Billups, died in 1973; her third husband, James Robinson, died in 1988. A son, Bill Boynton Jr., died last year. Survivors include another son, Bruce Carver Boynton, whose godfather was George Washington Carver, and a granddaughter.
Among her laurels is the Martin Luther King Jr. Freedom Medal, which she received in 1990.
In an interview with The New York Post in December, Mrs. Boynton Robinson reflected on the events of Bloody Sunday and the long road since.
"I wasn't looking for notoriety," she said. "But if that's what it took," she added, "I didn't care how many licks I got. It just made me even more determined to fight for our cause."
A version of this article appears in print on August 27, 2015, on page B17 of the New York edition with the headline: Amelia Boynton Robinson, 104, Dies; A Pivotal Figure at the Selma March .
Boynton spent her first two years of college at Georgia State College (now Savannah State University), then transferred to the Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) in Alabama. She graduated from Tuskegee with a home economics degree before further pursuing her education at Tennessee State University, Virginia State University and Temple University.
After working as a teacher in Georgia, Boynton took a job as Dallas County's home demonstration agent with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Selma, Alabama. In 1930, she met her co-worker, Dallas County extension agent Samuel Boynton. The two had in common their impassioned desire to better the lives of African-American members of their community, particularly sharecroppers. The couple married in 1936 and had two sons, Bill Jr. and Bruce Carver. Samuel died in 1963, but Amelia continued their commitment to improving the lives of African Americans.
She remarried in 1969, to a musician named Bob W. Billups. He died unexpectedly in a boating accident in 1973. Boynton eventually married a third time, to former Tuskegee classmate James Robinson, and moved back to Tuskegee after the wedding. When Robinson died in 1988, Boynton stayed in Tuskegee.
After suffering several strokes, Mrs.Boynton Robinson died on August 26, 2015 at the age of 104. Her son Bruce Boynton said of his mother's commitment to civil rights: "The truth of it is that was her entire life. That's what she was completely taken with. She was a loving person, very supportive — but civil rights was her life."∼American Civil Rights leader.
∼Civil Right Activast. Born in 1911 she was one of ten children. Her family encouraged the children to learn to read and write. Amelia attended two years at Georgia State College (now Savannah State University). She transferred to Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University), earning a degree in home economics. Platts taught in Georgia before starting with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in Selma as the home demonstration agent for Dallas County. She educated the county's largely rural population about food production and processing, nutrition, healthcare, and other subjects related to agriculture and homemaking. In 1934 she registered to vote, which was extremely difficult for African Americans to accomplish in Alabama. While working at the USDA she met her future husband Samuel W. Boynton. They married in 1936. In 1954 the Boyntons met Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and his wife Coretta Scott King at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, where King was the pastor. After her husband s death in 1963 Boynton worked with Martin Luther King, James Bevel, and others of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to plan demonstrations for civil and voting rights from 1964 and 1965. To protest continuing segregation of blacks, in early 1965 Amelia Boynton helped organize a march to the state capital of Montgomery, initiated by James Bevel, which took place on March 7, 1965. Led by John Lewis around 600 protesters including Rosa Parks along with other civil rights leaders arrived to participate in the event which would become known "Bloody Sunday" when county and state police stopped the march and beat demonstrators after they left the Edmund Pettus Bridge and crossed into the county. Boynton was beaten unconscious; a photograph of her lying on Edmund Pettus Bridge went around the world. Boynton remarried in 1969, to a musician named Bob W. Billups. He died unexpectedly in a boating accident in 1973. Amelia Boynton eventually married again to a former Tuskegee classmate James Robinson. She moved with him to Tuskegee after the wedding. James Robinson died in 1988. Robinson worked for civil right for the rest of her life and in 1990, Boynton won the Martin Luther King Jr. Medal of Freedom. In 2014, the Selma City Council renamed five blocks of Lapsley Street as Boyntons Street to honor Amelia Boynton Robinson and Sam Boynton. In 2015, Robinson attended the State of the Union Address at the invitation of President Barack Obama, and, in her wheelchair, was at Obama's side as he and others walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge during the Selma Voting Rights Movement 50th anniversary Jubilee in March of 2015.∼Amelia Boynton Robinson, a Pivotal Figure at the Selma March, Dies at 104
By MARGALIT FOX
AUG. 26, 2015
Amelia Boynton Robinson, who was called the matriarch of the voting rights movement — and whose photograph, showing her beaten, gassed and left for dead in the epochal civil rights march known as Bloody Sunday, appeared in newspapers and magazines round the world in 1965 — died on Wednesday in Montgomery, Ala. She was 104.
Her death was confirmed by Shawn Eckles, a family spokesman.
Mrs. Boynton Robinson was one of the organizers of the march, the first of three attempts by demonstrators in March 1965 to walk the 54 miles from Selma, Ala., to the capital, Montgomery, to demand the right to register to vote.
As shown in "Selma," the Oscar-nominated 2014 film directed by Ava DuVernay, Mrs. Boynton Robinson (played by Lorraine Toussaint) had helped persuade the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who would lead the second and third marches, to concentrate his efforts in that city.
Bloody Sunday took place on March 7, 1965. As they tried to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, some 600 black demonstrators, led by John Lewis and the Rev. Hosea Williams, were set upon by Alabama state troopers armed with tear gas, billy clubs and whips.
Walking near the front of the line and subject to the full force of the troopers' blows, Mrs. Boynton Robinson, then known as Amelia Boynton, was knocked unconscious. One widely reproduced press photograph shows her lying insensible on the ground with a white officer standing over her, nightstick in hand. Another shows a fellow marcher taking her in his arms and struggling to lift her up.
News coverage of Bloody Sunday — in which at least 17 demonstrators, including Mrs. Boynton Robinson, were hospitalized — was considered pivotal in winning wide popular support for the civil rights movement. After her release, Mrs. Boynton Robinson was a guest of honor at the White House on Aug. 6, 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the federal Voting Rights Act into law, an event seen as a direct consequence of the marches.
"She was as strong, as hopeful and as indomitable of spirit — as quintessentially American — as I'm sure she was that day 50 years ago," President Obama said in a statement on Wednesday. "To honor the legacy of an American hero like Amelia Boynton requires only that we follow her example — that all of us fight to protect everyone's right to vote."
Mrs. Boynton Robinson, who had worked to register Southern black voters since the 1930s and in 1964 ran unsuccessfully for Congress from Alabama, remained involved in civil rights advocacy to the end of her life. On March 7 of this year, as part of the 50th-anniversary commemoration of Bloody Sunday, Mrs. Boynton Robinson, using a wheelchair, held hands with Mr. Obama as they traversed the Edmund Pettus Bridge together.
One of 10 children of George Platts, a building contractor, and the former Anna Eliza Hicks, Amelia Platts was born in Savannah, Ga., on Aug. 18, 1911. As a child, before the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920 gave women the vote, she traveled with her mother by horse and buggy to pass out leaflets advocating women's suffrage.
At 14, Amelia entered what was then the Georgia State Industrial College for Colored Youth and is now Savannah State University. She later transferred to the Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University), where she studied under the renowned botanist George Washington Carver and earned a degree in home economics.
She then took a job as a demonstration agent with the United States Department of Agriculture. Working in Dallas County, Ala., of which Selma is the seat, she gave instruction in food, nutrition and homemaking in rural households throughout the county.
With her husband, Samuel William Boynton, whom she married in 1936, she spent decades attempting to register black voters in Alabama. Despite nearly insurmountable odds, including prohibitive examinations designed to deter black aspirants, she had managed to register there herself in the early '30s.
Mr. Boynton died in 1963, and the next year, Mrs. Boynton Robinson ran for Congress from Alabama. She was the first black person since Reconstruction, and the first black woman ever, to do so. She received about 10 percent of the vote, a noteworthy figure given how few African-Americans were registered in her district at the time.
Edward Hershey
"Every time another of these heroes and heroines dies — and we have seen several go in the recent past — it underscores what a cruel betrayal..."
Mrs. Boynton Robinson, who had met Dr. King in 1954 and been involved with the work of his Southern Christian Leadership Conference ever since, had long opened her house in Selma as a meeting ground for civil rights leaders in the area. The Selma-to-Montgomery marches were planned there, and an early draft of the Voting Rights Act was written there.
In later years, Mrs. Boynton Robinson incurred criticism for her association with Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr., a former Marxist activist who came increasingly to be considered a member of the right-wing fringe. (Mr. LaRouche served time in prison after being convicted in 1988 on charges including mail fraud and conspiring to defraud the Internal Revenue Service.)
For years, until her retirement in 2009, Mrs. Boynton Robinson served on the board of the Schiller Institute, a think tank founded in the 1980s and closely associated with Mr. LaRouche. Her memoir, "Bridge Across Jordan," was reprinted by the institute in 1991.
Mrs. Boynton Robinson also made headlines in 2004 when she lost a multimillion-dollar defamation suit against ABC and the Walt Disney Company over the 1999 television film "Selma, Lord, Selma." She charged that the film depicted her as an "Aunt Jemima" who sang gospel songs and spoke in a stereotyped dialect. (She had nothing but praise for Ms. DuVernay's film.)
At her death, Mrs. Boynton Robinson lived in Tuskegee, Ala. Her second husband, Bob W. Billups, died in 1973; her third husband, James Robinson, died in 1988. A son, Bill Boynton Jr., died last year. Survivors include another son, Bruce Carver Boynton, whose godfather was George Washington Carver, and a granddaughter.
Among her laurels is the Martin Luther King Jr. Freedom Medal, which she received in 1990.
In an interview with The New York Post in December, Mrs. Boynton Robinson reflected on the events of Bloody Sunday and the long road since.
"I wasn't looking for notoriety," she said. "But if that's what it took," she added, "I didn't care how many licks I got. It just made me even more determined to fight for our cause."
A version of this article appears in print on August 27, 2015, on page B17 of the New York edition with the headline: Amelia Boynton Robinson, 104, Dies; A Pivotal Figure at the Selma March .
Family Members
Sponsored by Ancestry
Advertisement
Advertisement
