Civil-rights activist was never scared in struggle

[struggle4progress]

Wednesday, February 14, 2007 1:16 a.m.
By Brandie M. Jefferson
Journal Staff Writer

SOUTH KINGSTOWN — ... Amelia Boynton-Robinson .... was one of about 600 people making their way across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in March 1965 to bring attention to discriminatory laws that kept the city’s black residents — about half of its population — from voting ...

“To look and see blood — people’s blood, human beings’ blood — all on the highway … I was appalled and shocked,” she said. “When they told me to run, it made me angry. Run from what? Not from fear … When they hit me the first time, I just looked at them and I was stunned.” ...

Boynton-Robinson remembers meeting <Bernard > LaFayette through Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who was looking to staff cities across the South with activists. King, she said, had written Selma off because it was too vicious. “LaFayette said ‘I’ll take Selma,’ ” Boynton-Robinson recalled, and once he began recruiting students, political activism in Selma grew like tumbleweed ...

http://www.projo.com/news/content/SC_URICIVIL14_02-14-07_G04DJBL.17a5496.html