Amelia Boyton Robinson is a civil rights trailblazer who played a key role of the 1965 voting rights act. Amelia Boynton had come to Selma, Alabama as an agricultural extension agent in 1929 where she met and married her co-worker Samuel William Boyton. and used their government positions encourage Black people to register to vote and buy land. So, when Bernard Lafayette and his wife Colia Liddell of the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) came to Selma, Alabama in the fall of 1962, they found Amelia Boynton and her husband were ready and primed for action. In 1962, she ran for a congress seat in the US House. Making her the first female African American to run for office in Alabama and as a democrat in the state. In spite of intense voter suppression she received 10% of the votes. She invited Martin Luther King Jr & to organize civil rights efforts in her home. She was instrumental in organizing the Selma to Montgomery Marches. She was documented unconscious in the streets during Bloody Sunday. The public beating of black civil rights activists led to President Lyndon B. Johnson signing the Voting Rights Act of 1964, she was in attendance when he signed it. Amelia Boynton Robinson died in 2015. Just months before her death, Amelia crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge again, this time with President Obama and Congressman John Lewis. They, and hundreds of others, were there to mark the 50th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery march.