Selma activist viciously beaten on famous march
Amelia Boynton Robinson, US civil rights activist: b Georgia, August 18, 1911; m Bruce Boynton (diss), Bob Billups (dec), James Robinson (dec); d Alabama, August 26, 2015, aged 104.
AMELIA BOYNTON ROBINSON was an American civil rights activists who led voting drives and ran for Congress – and whose severe beating by police during the 1965 ‘‘Bloody Sunday’’ confrontation at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, shocked her country.
Born when slavery and the Civil War were still in living memory, Boynton Robinson became a voting rights activist in the 1930s and was a friend of Martin Luther King Jr, Rosa Parks and other civil rights leaders in the 1950s and 1960s.
She lived long enough to attend President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address in January and to accompany the president across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in March, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Selma march that almost claimed her life.
‘‘She was as strong, as hopeful, and as indomitable of spirit – as quintessentially American – as I’m sure she was that day 50 years ago,’’ Obama said after her death.
Boynton Robinson was portrayed by actress Lorraine Toussaint in the 2014 feature film Selma, directed by Ava DuVernay.
In 1934, Boynton Robinson became one of the few African American women registered to vote in Selma. She and her husband, SW ‘‘Bill’’ Boynton, worked for the county agricultural extension service before opening real estate and insurance offices. For years, her son said, she was publicly known by only her initials, AP Boynton, so that white people would not dismissively call her by her first name.
The Boyntons, who were leaders in Selma’s black community, met King in 1954. After her husband died in 1963, Boynton Robinson became the first African American woman in Alabama to run for Congress. She lost in the 1964 Democratic primary.
Her congressional campaign brought attention to the lack of voting rights among African Americans in the South. More than half the residents of Selma and surrounding Dallas County were African American, but only 2 per cent were registered to vote.
In January 1965, while leading a voters’ drive at the courthouse in Selma, Boynton Robinson was charged with ‘‘criminal provocation’’ and was arrested by the county’s notoriously racebaiting sheriff, Jim Clark.
‘‘When she refused to leave the sidewalk in front of the courthouse, Sheriff Clark grabbed her by the back of her collar and pushed her roughly and swiftly for half a block into a patrol car,’’ the New York Times reported.
King, who was watching from across the street, immediately went to officials of the Justice Department to demand a court injunction against the sheriff.
‘‘It was one of the most brutal and unlawful acts I have seen an officer commit,’’ King said at the time. Things would get worse. Along with the Reverend CT Vivian and others, Boynton Robinson planned a march from Selma to the Alabama capital of Montgomery, more than 70km away. It was scheduled for March 7, 1965.
As about 600 marchers walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, they were met by 200 state troopers, plus posses of white men, many on horseback, deputised for the day by Sheriff Clark.
The marchers were given two minutes to disperse. After one minute and five seconds, the phalanx of troopers and vigilantes advanced.
‘‘I saw them as we marched across the bridge, some with gas masks on, clubs and cattle prods in their hands, some on horses,’’ Boynton Robinson said in 2005. ‘‘They came from the right, the left, the front and started beating people.’’
A trooper struck her on the shoulder with a billy club.
‘‘I gave him a dirty look,’’ she said, ‘‘and the second time I was hit at the base of my neck. I fell
Barack Obama, US President unconscious. I woke up in a hospital.’’
A photographer captured the incident, as a fellow marcher sought to comfort Boynton Robinson, who was 53 at the time. She was wearing a light-coloured coat, gloves and heels.
Another marcher on the front line was John Lewis, now a Democratic congressman from Georgia. Before going to the hospital with a fractured skull, Lewis said, ‘‘I don’t see how President Johnson can send troops to Vietnam; I don’t see how he can send troops to the Congo; I don’t see how he can send troops to Africa and can’t send troops to Selma, Alabama.’’
Sheriff Clark reportedly told his officers not to offer any assistance to the nearly 70 marchers who were injured. As for Boynton Robinson, he said: ‘‘Let the buzzards eat her.’’
She was rescued by other marchers and taken to a segregated hospital, where she recovered.
Throughout the country, people were appalled at the graphic images of police violence on the day that became known as Bloody Sunday. Two weeks later, King led another march from Selma to Montgomery.
‘‘How long will justice be crucified and truth buried?’’ King said at the march’s end. ‘‘How long? Not long. Because no lie can live forever.’’
Within months, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. When President Lyndon Johnson signed the bill at the White House, one of his invited guests was Boynton Robinson.
She was born Amelia Isadora Platts in Savannah, Georgia, where her father was a builder. While still in her teens, she graduated from the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, where she became a friend of the noted botanist George Washington Carver.
In 1936, Boynton Robinson wrote a play, Through the Years, about a former slave who won election to Congress during Reconstruction. It was based on the life of her father’s half-brother, Robert Smalls.
In 2007, Boynton Robinson attended the funeral of Clark, her onetime nemesis, who died unrepentant. ‘‘He was supposed to have been so popular, but there were only 80 people at his funeral,’’ she told CNN this year.
‘‘I was brought up by people who loved others,’’ Boynton Robinson added. ‘‘We had no animosity. We had no feeling that we hate anyone.’’
JOY BEVERLEY was the oldest of the Beverley Sisters, who scored a string of sentimental hits in the 1950s with songs such as I Saw Mummy Kissing Santa Claus, Little Donkey and Drummer Boy.
In a pre-rock’n’roll era, the trio’s sweet harmonising and Barbie-doll looks made them stars of stage, radio and television, which was just beginning to establish its place in British households.
Sisters – the Beverleys’ theme song written by Irving Berlin in 1954 – contained the line ‘‘there were never such devoted sisters’’.
Throughout their lives they dressed identically and were almost indistinguishable from each other. The two younger sisters, Teddie and Babs, were twins; but Joy, who was three years older, shared the same fair curls, long legs and glitzy costumes, creating a triple-decker sex symbol of the most wholesome kind. In a time of post-war thrift, the image was entirely homemade.
‘‘We worked very hard not just singing but arranging all our own choreography and our outfits. We always had to match,’’ Joy said. In interviews, Joy and her sisters had the disconcerting habit of finishing each other’s sentences; ‘‘don’t worry about who says what, we all think the same,’’ they told one interviewer.
At the height of their fame they shared a Rolls-Royce with the registration plate BEV 3. They lived in adjacent homes in north London, where they bought a plot of land and built three identical houses ‘‘detached, but almost touching’’. When Joy and her sisters arrived at Buckingham Palace in 2006 to receive their MBEs they were attired impeccably in matching cream suits and pink hats.
By then they had entered the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s longest running pop act with the same line-up, boasting that although they had no formal musical training they had never hit a wrong note in their lives. They had also been the first British girl group to break into the US Top 10.
The sisters underwent an improbable revival in popularity in the 1980s. They had lapsed into semi-retirement and passed on the baton to their daughters, who were performing for the nightclub owner Peter Stringfellow as a singing group called the Foxes.
One night when Joy and her sisters went to see the show, they