Selma rights activist Amelia Boynton Robinson dies at 104

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. - Amelia Boynton Robinson, 104, who helped lead the 1965 "Bloody Sunday" voting rights march and was the first black woman to run for Congress in Alabama, died Wednesday at a Montgomery hospital, surrounded by family and friends. She suffered a stroke in July.

Mrs. Boynton Robinson was among those beaten during the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma in March 1965 that became known as Bloody Sunday. State troopers teargassed and clubbed marchers as they tried to cross the bridge. A newspaper photo featuring an unconscious Boynton Robinson drew wide attention.

"Civil rights was her life," said her son Bruce.

Fifty years after Bloody Sunday, President Obama held her hand as she was pushed across the bridge in a wheelchair during a commemoration.

"To honor the legacy of an American hero like Amelia Boynton requires only that we follow her example - that all of us fight to protect everyone's right to vote," Obama said Wednesday in a written statement.

In January, she attended the State of the Union address as a special guest of Rep. Terri Sewell, who said the rights activist's 1964 run for Congress paved the way for Sewell as Alabama's first elected black congresswoman.

Mrs. Boynton Robinson, who helped organize the Selma-to-Montgomery march, asked the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to come to Selma to galvanize the local community.

Charles Steele, president and CEO of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, said in a written statement that Mrs. Boynton Robinson was "the straw that stirred the drink." He compared her legacy in Selma to that of Rosa Parks in Montgomery.

Mrs. Boynton Robinson, who was born in Savannah, Ga., worked as an educator there and with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Selma. Tuskegee University officials have said she graduated from the school in 1927 and donated much of her personal memorabilia to the university, where she studied under the botanist and inventor George Washington Carver.

Boynton said his family was planning events in his mother's honor in Tuskegee and Selma, and was also arranging a ceremony at the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Sept. 8.