President Barack Obama held the hand of Amelia Boynton Robinson as they crossed the Edmund Petts Bridge 50 years after Bloody Sunday.
Amelia Boynton Robinson, a matriarch of the civil rights movement immortalized in a photograph taken on Bloody Sunday, has died.
She turned 104 on August 18, though some in her closest circles insist she was 110.
Boynton Robinson suffered a stroke last month and had been hospitalized in Montgomery, Alabama. She died early Wednesday, relatives said.
Her remarkable life was reintroduced to America this year with the movie “Selma,” which portrayed the 1965 demonstrations that led to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Boynton Robinson grew up in Savannah, Georgia, and worked as an educator. She moved to Alabama in the 1930s with her husband, Samuel Boynton. The couple began fighting for voting rights in the poorest parts of the state entrenched in the thick of Jim Crow.