103-Year-Old Civil Rights Icon: ‘Thank God we Learned That Color Makes No Difference’

Amelia Boynton Robinson was scarcely beaten to genocide in 1965 during a initial impetus in Selma, Alabama, led by Martin Luther King Jr. She was 53 years aged during a time. A striking print of Boynton Robinson, exceedingly beaten and collapsed, widespread around a universe and became an iconic picture of a polite rights era.

Boynton Robinson survived a savagery and disharmony of a time and is alive currently to speak about it, during 103 years old. One of a nation’s oldest polite rights activists, she stays an essential figure of a movement. She was one of a initial people to titillate King to transport to Selma in a initial place, and was also a initial lady and initial African-American to ever run for Congress in Alabama.

“Thank God we schooled that tone creates no difference,” Boynton Robinson pronounced Friday during a private luncheon during a Soho House in West Hollywood, California. “My relatives [were] an instance for what they wanted their children to be.”

The polite rights activist, dressed in dark yellow and sparking jewels, was respected during a luncheon with Cinema for Peace’s

Boynton Robinson trafficked with friends and family to Los Angeles only in time for Sunday’s Academy Awards, where “Selma” was nominated for Best Original Song and Best Picture (Common and John Legend took home a former endowment for their strain “Glory”). Boynton Robinson is portrayed in a movie, which she calls “fantastic,”

Though she sat in her wheelchair with a complicated cloak around her shoulders, Boynton Robinson enthusiastically common her thoughts into a microphone in a solid and transparent voice, and even sang a few lines of a strain she and associate marchers sang in jail together all those years ago.

“I demeanour behind during a time that we fought and when those heads were beaten,” she said. “I demeanour during what God brought to us. Dr. King burst a doorway open. People rose adult and felt that they were only as good as everybody else.”

Amelia Boynton Robinson in Los Angeles on Feb. 20, 2015.

In January, Boynton Robinson trafficked to Washington, D.C., for President Barack Obama’s State of a Union address, attending as a special guest

Boynton Robinson wishes that after all she fought for, a state of competition family underneath a nation’s initial black boss were some-more positive. “I demeanour during a boss and see hatred entrance out of a minds of so many people since of his color,” she said.

Boynton Robinson in New York in 2011.

“People have hatred within their souls and that’s what we have to get absolved of,” she continued. “I consider so mostly of what my mom pronounced when people felt they couldn’t get absolved of a evilness and hatred [in a world]. She used to say, ‘You are not evil. You’re not mean. You’re not hateful. Lift adult your heads — we are descendants of Him.’”

But Boynton Robinson is conjunction sour nor disappointed. As she looks behind on all she has seen and experienced, her viewpoint is positive. “It creates me comprehend that this is where we belong,” she said.

“This is where God sees me — during this age, during 103 years aged — in sequence that we competence be means to strech out and lift [people] up.”

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