Amelia Boynton remembered as the ‘Rosa Parks’ of Selma Movement

WASHINGTON (NNPA)—Amelia Boynton Robinson, who died Wednesday, Aug. 26, in Montgomery, Ala., at the age of 104, is being praised as the “Rosa Parks” of the Selma voting rights movement.
Mrs. Boynton, as she was known throughout the movement, had been hospitalized since suffering a stroke in July. She was a courageous voting rights crusader who was brutally beaten on “Bloody Sunday” on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the first leg of the Selma to Montgomery, Ala., March that provided the impetus for passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, which was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson.
She and her late husband, Sam Boynton, opened their home to Atlanta-based voting rights organizers representing the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. also conducted many of his strategy sessions in the Boynton home.