Amelia Boynton Robinson, one of the many Civil Rights activists who bravely endured the 1965 “Bloody Sunday” march on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, has died at the age of 104.
According to a report by her family, Boynton Robinson died last week on Wednesday August 26, at 2:20 am. She had been hospitalized in Montgomery since July after suffering a major stroke shortly before her birthday on August 18.
“The truth of it is that was her entire life. That’s what she was completely taken with,” her son Bruce Boynton said in a statement. “She was a loving person, very supportive — but civil rights was her life.”
Born in Savannah, Georgia, Amelia Boynton Robinson worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Selma and as a local educator as life grew increasingly rough for Black people living in the south. The right to vote had been granted for every qualifying U.S. citizen but the state of Alabama–particularly Selma–had refused to honor the Constitutional Amendment.
On March 7, 1965, Boynton Robinson was one of several hundred peaceful protestors who set out to march alongside of U.S. Highway 80. Led by John Lewis of SNCC and Reverend Hosea Williams of SCLC, the group was attacked and brutally beaten at the behest of Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark. A photo of an unconscious Boynton Robinson graced the front page of the newspaper the next day and quickly became of a national image of the injustice.
Fifty years later, President Barack Obama accompanied both Boynton Robinson and Lewis across the Edmund Pettus Bridge to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the event this past March. On December 25, 2014, the critically acclaimed film Selma was released and Boynton Robinson was portrayed by Lorraine Toussaint.
Embed from Getty ImagesAmelia Boynton Robinson will also be remembered as the first Black woman to run for Congress in Alabama and will be honored during a memorial at the Edmund Pettus Bridge on September 8.
