Amelia Boynton Robinson A remarkaBle Rhetoric
Amelia Boynton is a very important leader and an amazing representative of a woman who struggled for civil rights in the South. Not only was she a leader of the 1965 Montgomery march, she was also a feminist, a teacher and one of the last links to the era of segregation.
Amelia Boynton was born on August 18, 1911, in Savannah, Georgia. Boynton spent her first two years of college at Georgia State College, then transferred to the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama (Find.galegroup.com). She graduated from Tuskegee with a home economics degree before further pursuing her education at Tennessee State University, Virginia State University and Temple University (Bio.com).
After working as a teacher in Georgia, Boynton took a job as Dallas County's home demonstration agent with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Selma, Alabama (Bio.com).
Her early activism included holding black voter registration drives in Selma, Alabama, from the 1930s through the '50s (Bio.com). She demanded young black women in particular should pursue independent careers and make their political voices heard (find.galegroup.com). In 1964, she became both the first African-American woman and the first female Democratic candidate to run for a seat in Congress from Alabama (Visionaryprojet.org). The following year, she helped lead a civil rights march during which she was brutally beaten by state troopers (Bio.com). She was unconscious for two days straight after the protest was broken up (find.galegroup.com). The event, which became known as Bloody Sunday, drew nationwide attention to the Civil Rights movement. In 1990, Boynton won the Martin Luther King Jr. Medal of Freedom.
After suffering several strokes, Boynton Robinson died on August 26, 2015 at the age of 104 (Npr.org). Her son Bruce Boynton, now an attorney in Selma, said of his mother's commitment to civil rights: "The truth of it is that was her entire life. That's what she was completely taken with. She was a loving person, very supportive — but civil rights was her life (Bio.com & find.galegroup.com)."