Mrs. Amelia Boynton Robinson

August 18, 1911 - August 26, 2015

Amelia Boynton was a businesswoman, an activist and leader of the fight for voting rights in Selma, AL. Though she is probably best known as the woman who was beaten and left for dead at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday (March 5, 1965), her life and legacy is far richer than that.

The New York Times Magazine wrote about Boynton in 2015: “Defiance was, and always would be, the defining characteristic of her life.” It’s true. Born in Savannah, GA and a graduate of Tuskegee University, she was always predisposed to action. As a 10 year old, in 1921, she helped her mom distribute fliers urging women to take advantage of their newly won right to vote.

Amelia and her husband, Bill Boynton, dedicated their lives to helping members of the Selma community, by educating people about food production and nutrition, providing access to basic health care and registering voters through their courageous work with the Dallas County Voters League. Amelia, herself, registered to vote at the age of 23 in 1933, overcoming systemic racist barriers to the franchise: poll taxes, literacy tests and insidious intimidation by the white majority. By 1964, only 2% of eligible blacks were registered to vote in Selma.

It was Amelia who first welcomed Bernard Lafayette, then a young SNCC organizer, to Selma in 1963. She was also one of leading advocates of the Selma voting rights movement, convincing Dr. Martin Luther King and his SLCC colleagues to make Selma the staging ground for the next big campaign in the Civil Rights Movement in early 1965.

Amelia Boynton is an unsung hero of American history, the civil rights movement, the global fight for human rights. Know her name, cherish her story.