Civil rights activist Amelia Boynton Robinson dies at 104

Amelia Boynton Robinson, who went from being beaten on a bridge in Selma, Ala., in 1965 to being pushed across the bridge in a wheelchair alongside the president of the United States, has died at age 104. She had been hospitalized after suffering several strokes this summer.

“Boynton Robinson asked Martin Luther King Jr.to come to Selma to mobilize the local community in the civil rights movement”. With deep sadness, we announce that she passed peaceably this morning with family and friends surrounding her at approximately 2:20 a.m.in Noland Hospital of Montgomery in Alabama. Fifty years ago, she marched in Selma, and the quiet heroism of those marchers helped pave the way for the landmark Voting Rights Act.

Boynton ran for the Congress from Alabama in 1964 – the first female African American to run for office in that state and was the first woman of any race to run for the ticket of the Democratic Party in the state. President Barack Obama holds hands with Amelia Boynton Robinson as they walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama.

Robinson is played by Lorraine Toussaint in the 2014 film Selma. But for the rest of her life, she kept marching – to make sure the law was upheld, and barriers to the polls torn down.

Boynton was born on August 18, 1911 in Savannah, Georgia.

Tuskegee University officials have said Boynton Robinson graduated from the school in 1927 and in recent years donated much of her personal memorabilia from the 1950s and 1960s to the university.