Amelia Boynton Robinson

Amelia Isadora Platts Boynton Robinson (August 18, 1911 – August 26, 2015) was an American activist who was a leader of the American Civil Rights Movement in Selma, Alabama, and a key figure in the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches.

Amelia Isadora Platts was born in Savannah, Georgia, on August 18, 1911, to George and Anna Eliza (née Hicks) Platts, both of whom were African-American.

She also had Cherokee and German ancestry.

Church was central to Amelia and her nine siblings' upbringing.

As a young girl, she became involved in campaigning for women's suffrage.

Her family encouraged the children to read.

Amelia attended two years at Georgia State Industrial College for Colored Youth (now Savannah State University, a historically black college).

She transferred to Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University), earning a degree in home economics in 1927.

(Platts later also studied at Tennessee State, Virginia State, and Temple University.)

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.

She met her future husband, Samuel William Boynton, in Selma, where he was working as a county extension agent during the Great Depression.

In 1934, Amelia Boynton registered to vote, which was extremely difficult for African Americans to accomplish in Alabama, due to discriminatory practices under the state's disenfranchising constitution passed at the turn of the century.

They married in 1936 and had two sons, Bill Jr. and Bruce Carver Boynton.

Her son, Bruce Carver Boynton, was the godson and namesake of George Washington Carver.

Later they adopted Amelia's two nieces Sharon (Platts) Seay and Germaine (Platts) Bowser.

Amelia and Samuel had known the noted scholar George Washington Carver at the Tuskegee Institute, from which they both graduated.

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.

In 1958, her son, Bruce Boynton, was a student at Howard University School of Law when he was arrested while attempting to purchase food at the white section of a bus terminal in Richmond, Virginia.

Arrested for trespassing, Bruce Boynton was found guilty in state court of a misdemeanor and fined, which he appealed and lost until the case, Boynton v. Virginia, was argued before the U.S. Supreme Court by Thurgood Marshall, reversing lower court decisions.

It had effectively excluded most blacks from politics for decades, an exclusion that continued into the 1960s.

A few years later she wrote a play, Through the Years, which told the story of the creation of Spiritual music and a former slave who was elected to Congress during Reconstruction, based on her father's half-brother Robert Smalls, in order to help fund a community center in Selma, Alabama.

In 1963, Samuel Boynton died.

It was a time of increased activism in the Civil Rights Movement.

Amelia made her home and office in Selma a center for strategy sessions for Selma's civil rights battles, including its voting rights campaign.

In 1964, Boynton ran for the Congress from Alabama, hoping to encourage black registration and voting.

She was the first female African American to run for office in Alabama and the first woman of any race to run for the ticket of the Democratic Party in the state.

She received 10% of the vote.

She was also part of the steering committee of the Dallas County Voters League, becoming part of the "courageous eight".

In late 1964 and early 1965, Boynton worked with Martin Luther King Jr., Diane Nash, James Bevel, and others of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to plan demonstrations for civil and voting rights.

While Selma had a population that was 50 percent black, only 300 of the town's African-American residents were registered as voters in 1965, after thousands had been arrested in protests.

To protest continuing segregation and disenfranchisement 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, Hosea Williams and Bob Mants, and including Rosa Parks and others among the marchers, the event became known as Bloody Sunday when county and state police stopped the march and beat demonstrators after they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge into Dallas County.

Boynton was beaten unconscious; a photograph of her lying on Edmund Pettus Bridge went around the world.

"Then they charged. They came from the right. They came from the left. One [of the troopers] shouted: 'Run!' I thought, 'Why should I be running?' Then an officer on horseback hit me across the back of the shoulders and, for a second time, on the back of the neck. I lost consciousness."

Boynton suffered throat burns from the effects of tear gas.

By March 1966, after passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, 11,000 were registered to vote.

In 1984, she became founding vice-president of the Schiller Institute, which was affiliated with Lyndon LaRouche, a far-right activist.

She was awarded the Martin Luther King Jr. Freedom Medal in 1990.

Robinson was a centenarian and reached the age of 104.