Amelia Boynton Robinson, "matriarch of the Voting Rights Act," dies at 104

(The Christian Science Monitor) Amelia Boynton Robinson, a pivotal figure in the struggle for civil rights in Selma, Alabama—and whose picture, battered and left unconscious by police on the Edmund Pettus Bridge became an iconic image that publicized the often violent struggle to enfranchise black voters—died Wednesday (August 26) in a Montgomery, Alabama, Hospital.

Selma became a flashpoint in the civil rights movement in large part because of Boynton Robinson’s efforts to bring Martin Luther King Jr. to the city and make it a battleground in the fight to grant blacks the right to vote.

"Boynton Robinson, who had met Dr. King in 1954 and been involved with the work of his Southern Christian Leadership Conference ever since, had long opened her house in Selma as a meeting ground for civil rights leaders in the area," the New York Times obituary reported.