On August 18, 1911, Amelia Isadora Platts was born in Savannah, Georgia. She was an American activist who was a leader of the American Civil Rights Movement in Selma, Alabama.
Her upbringing, and those of her nine siblings, revolved around their church. She became involved in the movement for women’s suffrage when she was a young girl, and her family encouraged reading to their kids. When she was older, Platts studied for two years at the Colored Youth Division of Georgia State Industrial College, now Savannah State University, a historically Black college. Then, she transferred to Tuskegee Institute, where she graduated in 1927 with a degree in home economics. She met her future husband, Samuel William Boynton, in Selma, where he was working as a county extension agent during the Great Depression. They married in 1936.
In 1934, Amelia Boynton registered to vote, which was extremely difficult for African Americans to accomplish in Alabama, due to discriminatory practices under the state’s disenfranchising constitution passed at the turn of the century. It had effectively excluded most blacks from politics for decades, an exclusion that continued into the 1960s. In late 1964 and early 1965, Boynton worked with Martin Luther King Jr., Diane Nash, James Bevel, and others of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to plan demonstrations for civil and voting rights.
Boynton received the Martin Luther King Jr. Medal of Freedom in 1990 and made significant contributions to the civil rights movement. In the 2014 Oscar-nominated film, Selma, shows the Selma to Montgomery marches and the Selma Voting Rights Movement, which introduced the conflicts that African Americans faced to a new generation. Robinson, who was 103 years old at the time, was unable to go to the movie. Her friends and family were invited to a private screening that Paramount Pictures arranged at her house. She also flew to Washington, D.C. in 2015 to attend President Barack Obama’s State of the Union Address, where her life’s work had been recognized worldwide.
On August 26, 2015, Boynton passed away at the age of 104. Amelia Boynton is a lesser-known hero of American history, during the civil rights movement and the worldwide fight for human rights.
