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History > USA > Civil rights > Activists
Amelia Robinson 1911-2015
Mrs. Boynton Robinson with a fellow marcher in 1965 after being knocked unconscious by Alabama troopers at the bridge.
Photograph: Pictorial Parade/Archive Photos/Getty Images
Amelia Boynton Robinson, a Pivotal Figure at the Selma March, Dies at 104 By MARGALIT FOX NYT AUG. 26, 2015
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/27/us/
Amelia Boynton Robinson 1911-2015
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 (2015), 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-American were registered in her district at the time.
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.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/27/us/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/27/us/
http://www.npr.org/2015/08/27/
http://www.npr.org/2015/08/26/
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/08/26/
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