A World that Might Yet Be
Photo by Unseen Histories on Unsplash
When I feel like the world is careening off the rails and I’m ready to throw up my hands in despair, I remember Amelia Boynton Robinson.
I will never forget the night that I found myself in the same sanctuary as Boynton Robinson. It was March 2015, the 50th anniversary of a world-changing march, led by everyday Black residents of Selma, Alabama, who were intent on securing the civil rights that had so long been denied them. Many of the activists who participated in what would become known as “Bloody Sunday” returned for that 50th jubilee, which kicked off with a mass meeting at Selma’s Tabernacle Baptist Church. The place was packed with a standing-room-only crowd.
I was sitting in the balcony with a colleague and group of students from Valparaiso University, where I taught at the time. We were singing and clapping along with the rousing gospel choir, when all the sudden a dramatic hush came over the assembly. I craned my neck to see what was happening and saw that someone was wheeling in an elderly woman. It was Boynton Robinson.
You may have never heard of her. She’s not a household name, but like so many other Black women who made the Civil Rights movement move, she should be. The hush came over the crowd that night in March 2015 because, in Selma, folks know that Boynton Robinson was one of the key players in the long fight for voting rights.
In January 1964 it was she who reached out to Martin Luther King Jr to ask him and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to support local efforts to get Black residents in that part of Alabama the vote. Boynton Robinson went on to offer King and the SCLC the use of their home, even as she declared a run for Congress. The decision underscored her remarkable courage: she was the first woman, White or Black, to run for Congress in Alabama, and the first Black person to run for Congress in the state since Reconstruction. She received ten percent of the vote.
As civil rights activism increased in Dallas County, so did the backlash against it. On 18 February 1965 state troopers fatally shot twenty-six-year-old Jimmie Lee Jackson, whose crimes included mobilizing for voting rights and trying to protect his mother from being assaulted.
A few weeks later Hosea Williams, John Lewis, and, yes, Amelia Boynton, led a march to the state capitol to express their outrage directly to Governor George Wallace. But not long after departing downtown Selma and as they came to the top of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the marchers beheld line after line of state troopers, wearing white helmets and carrying billy clubs. Behind them were sheriff’s deputies and assorted spectators, waving Confederate flags. The troopers rebuffed Hosea Williams’ request for a word with command and soon commenced an onslaught. Donning gas masks and riding horseback, they unleashed a rain of tear gas and billy clubs. Amelia Boynton was knocked unconscious by their blows. She and sixteen others had to be hospitalized.
Dr. King had stayed in Atlanta, with plans to join the marchers en route to Montgomery, but he quickly returned to Selma. Two days later he led a march that turned back when demonstrators were once more confronted by state troopers. Finally, on 21 March, in the face of mounting public pressure, Governor Wallace relented, allowing the march to proceed. By the time it arrived in Montgomery it was 25,000-persons strong.
Bloody Sunday was a major turning point in modern United States history. The footage of law enforcement brutality against peaceful protesters was shown across the nation and world. The Soviets responded with glee: look at how the purported beacon of democracy treats its very own citizens, they proclaimed! Within the United States government a new urgency emerged. And sure enough: on 6 August 1965 Amelia Boynton was a guest of honor at the White House when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law, memorably invoking the lyrics of a great Civil Rights anthem: “and we shall overcome.”
Boynton played a significant role in those breakthroughs. And so it was truly inspiring to celebrate with her fifty years later at Tabernacle Baptist and to watch, several days after that, as this 103-year-old saint crossed the Edmund Pettus bridge one more time, holding the hand of the nation’s first Black president.
But I have yet to mention the part of Boynton’s story that I find most remarkable. It’s that she did not begin this work in 1964. She began it in the early 1930s. That was a moment in the history of Alabama and the United States of America when she had no rational reason whatsoever to believe that she would ever see the fruits of her labors—that at some future date the national media would descend on her small town and that a matter of months after that she would find herself at a White House signing ceremony. All that would have been, in the imagination of most, completely far-fetched. In the 1930s the much more believable possibility was that she would fail and die trying.
But try she did. For thirty years Boynton held meetings in rural churches and went through the process of educating Black neighbors on how to register to vote, even in the face of poll taxes and impossible exams. She did so with very little “success.” I sometimes try to imagine how discouraging it must have been to wake up in the morning in 1934 and see so little obvious fruit, let alone in 1944 or 1954 or 1964. But Boynton Robinson continued to lean into a world that might yet be. She kept doing the small faithful thing in front of her, living—in whatever modest ways she could—into the promise of a better day coming. Eventually, miraculously, that day came.
That day does not always come in our lifetime. And it is important to remember that Boynton Robinson lived not only to see the passage of the Voting Rights Act and the election of the nation’s first Black president, but also the gutting of that same voting rights act in 2013 and the beginnings of a new era of voter suppression. History is not a story of unbroken progress, but rather of fits and starts, forward and back.
In those moments when it seems clear that we’re lurching painfully backwards, I give thanks for the memory of Amelia Boynton Robinson, who inspires me to do the small faithful thing in front of me that day. One never knows what may come. But we can pray, as she did, not just with words, but with hands and feet, for a world in which God’s will is done on earth as it is in heaven. A world that might yet be.
