AMELIA
BOYTON
ROBINSON
Matriarch of Voting Rights Act Of 1965
There was a nice serendipity to the fact that AmeliaBoyntonRobinson died August 27, 2015. It was the anniversary of the WomensRightToVote.
At 106-years-old she was one of the few living suffragists. Even as young child
she was involved in campaigning for women's rights. Though as the daughter of #AfricanAmerican parents (with strains of #Cherokee and German heredity), the efforts would do little to help she and her black sisters at the time. Not that that stopped her.
After moving to #SelmaAlabama in 1929 with George Washington Carver; the then-teacher educated the county's largely rural population about food production and processing, nutrition, healthcare and related agriculture and homemaker skills.
And, against all odds, she registered to vote in 1932. At a time when fewer than 1% of blacks were allowed Alabama’s disenfranchising constitution, passed at the turn of the century, excluded most blacks from politics, until, thirty some years later, she became the matriarch of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
It all started in Selma, with Robinson. According to US Ambassador AndrewYoung. “Selma was Amelia Boynton’s idea.”
“This is the woman that nobody knows who came to see MartinLutherKing, just before Christmas in 1964 and said, ‘You need to come and help us in Selma,’ and that is where the Selma movement started,” said Young, who, at the time was in Dr. King’s inner circle.
It started with a march, in early March 1965 led by RosaParks, JohnLewis and others, including Robinson. She ended up unconscious, bloodied and bruised--and on the cover of newspapers worldwid, after police beat the marchers just after they left the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Three weeks later, federal protection and thousands more demonstrators joined them, swelling the group to 25,000.
At the time only 300 of the town's African-Americans were registered to vote.
Appalled by the violence, President Lyndon Johnson cited it when he passed the Voting Rights Act Of 1965. He invited Boynton to be his guest of when he signed it into law on August 6th.
Six months later, 11,000 of Montgomery’s black citizens were registered and hundreds of thousands more across the country, thanks to Robinson’s fearless and tireless efforts.
"I have been called rabble-rouser and an agitator. But because of my fighting, I was able to hand to the entire country the right for people to vote."
-- AmeliaBoyntonRobinson
