Civil rights activist Amelia Boynton Robinson dead at 104

Amelia Boynton Robinson, a noted civil rights activist who helped lead the 1965 “Bloody Sunday” march in Selma, Alabama, has died at the age of 104. She passed away early Wednesday morning, after being hospitalized earlier this summer following several strokes.

Boynton Robinson was a pioneer in the voting rights movement. She was one of several people to be severely beaten by state troopers as they tried to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in a march that came to be known as “Bloody Sunday”. A newspaper photograph featuring Boynton Robinson, unconscious, drew attention to the movement. Fifty years after that march, President Barack Obama held her hand as she was pushed in a wheelchair across the bridge during a commemoration of the event.

Boynton Robinson helped organize the event by asking Martin Luther King Jr. to come to Selma and mobilize the community to participate in the civil rights movement. She also worked with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to plan the event. When the Voting Rights Act passed, President Lyndon Johnson invited her to attend the signing.

In addition to being active in the civil rights movement, Boynton Robinson was the first black woman to run for Congress in Alabama. Although she lost, earlier this year she was invited to attend President Obama’s 2015 State of the Union address in Washington, D.C., as a guest of Rep. Terri Sewell — Alabama’s first black congresswoman.