Civil rights activist for racial equality and social and survivor of the Bloody Sunday in March 1965, Amelia Boynton Robinson, dies on early Wednesday morning due to natural causes. Boynton made history by being a figure in the 1965 march from Selma, Alabama to Montgomery to protest incessant segregation and disenfranchisement of African-Americans.
Amelia Boynton was born on August 18, 1911, from Savannah. Georgia. She went to then Georgia State College (now Savannah State University) and gained her degree in home economics in Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University). She was also the first woman to run for Congress in Alabama in 1964 to inspire black voting, and though she only got 11% of the vote, she became a trailblazer for being the first woman to run for office by the Democratic Party. She also worked with Martin Luther King Jr and James Bevel and became affiliated with Lyndon LaRouche and was known to support his work, eventually became vice president of the Schiller Institute and because of this involvement, in 1992, the petition for "Amelia Boynton Robinson Day" in Seattle WA was voided.
A number of tributes have been given to her and a film in 2014, Selma, about the Selma Voting Rights Movement; she was played by Lorraine Toussaint and in her Memoir Bridge across Jordan includes tributes from known people and colleagues.
In January 2015, Boynton Robinson was invited by President Barrack Obama to his State of the Union Address and on the 50th anniversary of the Selma Voting Rights Movement President Obama pushed her wheelchair across the Edmund Pettus Bridge
"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," Obama said on Wednesday in a written statement. "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."
In 2009 Amelia retired as VP of Schiller Institute and in 2011 she returned to her hometown in Savannah and suffered a series of strokes before she died on August 36, 2015. Boynton Robinson has outlived 3 husbands and a son. She was survived with her son Bruce Carver Boynton and a granddaughter.
