Fight to vote: the woman who was key in 'getting us the Voting Rights Act'
Happy Thursday, During the final week of Black History Month, I wanted to continue to look at the people who helped shape the Voting Rights Act, the powerful 1965 law that offered unprecedented protection for voting rights in America. As the country faces another surge of efforts to make it harder to vote, it’s a reminder of how hard Black Americans had to fight to gain and protect the rights to vote that are in place now.
Last week, I wrote about Bloody Sunday, the March 1965 protest that led directly to the Voting Rights Act. The heroes of that march – people like John Lewis, Hosea Williams and Martin Luther King Jr – have become lions of American history. But until recently, one of the most overlooked people in the march was Amelia Boynton (later Amelia Boynton Robinson), who had been organizing in Selma for years before Bloody Sunday and was the one who called in King to bring national attention to the voter suppression in the now historic city.
“She got us the Voting Rights Act,” said Carol Anderson, a historian at Emory University.
“It’s one of the ‘failings’, and I’ll put that in quotes, of the writings of the civil rights movement, is that women who are key in organizing are written out,” she added. “The grassroots work of Mrs Boynton just didn’t get the kind of respect and honor that it deserved.”
By the time Lewis, King and others arrived in Selma, Boynton was already one of the most well-known and respected people in its Black community. She came to the city in 1929 when she got a job with the US Department of Agriculture, traveling around the state to show African Americans how to improve their farming, but also talking to them about voting. She and her then husband, Samuel Boynton, held meetings in homes and churches, showing people how to register to vote as they faced literacy tests and poll taxes, Jim Crow era obstacles that prevented Black people from registering to vote.
She and Samuel Boynton ran an insurance agency, real estate office and employment agency. After her husband died, she became the first Black woman to run for Congress in 1964. Even though she lost – she got 10% of the vote – her campaign brought attention to the plight of Black voters in Selma, the Washington Post wrote in 2015. Though they made up more than half of the population, they composed just 2% of registered voters.
By 1964, Boynton was working with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (Sncc) to lead demonstrations in Selma. When a local judge issued an injunction essentially blocking protests, she traveled to a board meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) where she urged King to come to Selma. “We did not choose them, they chose us,” Andrew Young, then a civil rights leader with the SCLC, said in 1985.
In January 1965, Boynton was arrested outside the Dallas county courthouse as she led a voter registration drive. When she refused to leave the sidewalk, Jim Clark, the notoriously racist sheriff in Dallas county, grabbed her by her collar and pushed her half a block down the sidewalk into a police car, according to news reports. King, who witnessed the arrest, told the New York Times: “It was one of the most brutal and unlawful acts I have seen an officer commit.”
“She used her strength in the community. Her reputation in the community. Her organizing skills. She used her stature. She leveraged her resources in that community to fight for the right to vote,” Anderson said. “Remember it was when Jim Clark snatched her that folks in the black community got hella pissed. It is a way to see that the ugliness of Jim Crow affected everyone regardless of class.”
Robinson was on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday and was attacked.
“One of the officers came to me, state trooper, and he hit me across the back of my neck. And I made a slight turn and he hit me again, and I remember having fallen to the ground,” she would later recall. “Realizing that I could not move somebody said, ‘She’s dead.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘if she’s dead just pull her on the side and let the buzzards eat her.’”
When Lyndon B Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act months later, Boynton was a guest at the ceremony. In 2015, 50 years after she was beaten unconscious, Boynton was a guest of honor at Barack Obama’s State of the Union address. She held hands with Obama as he marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. She died later that year aged 104.
But even now, her words are more urgent than ever. Twenty years after Bloody Sunday, Boynton was asked whether all of the organizing and attacks were worth it when marchers from Selma finally reached the state capitol in Montgomery.
“By all means,” she said. “One of the greatest things in the world was when we were able to show to the governor that we were solidified. That we were together. That if he didn’t do something, that we were going to [go] over him and we were going to get our rights regardless of what happened.”
Also worth watching …
Georgia Republicans continue to blitz a wave of new voting restrictions through the legislature. It’s not yet clear what proposals will make it through to final legislation, but legislation introduced so far would require voters to show ID information with absentee ballots, limit early voting and do away with no-excuse absentee voting.
I spoke with Black women organizing in the south about what it meant to them to see Black women succeed in transforming Georgia elections over the last year. They spoke about how a sisterhood has developed among the women working in different states, and they’re working to bring the tactics from Georgia to other states.