Civil rights leader Amelia Boynton Robinson dies at 104

Amelia Boynton Robinson, a civil rights activist who helped plan the "Bloody Sunday" march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, died Wednesday after suffering a major stroke earlier in the summer. She was 104.

Boynton Robinson was born in Savannah, Georgia, and graduated from Tuskegee University in 1927. She personally asked Martin Luther King Jr. to come to Selma to help mobilize the community in the civil rights movement, The Montgomery Advertiser reports, and played a major role in putting together the voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery. Along with other protesters, Boynton Robinson was beaten during the march across Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge. In March, she returned to the bridge to mark the 50th anniversary of the incident, and held hands with President Obama. In the movie Selma, Boynton Robinson was played by actress Lorraine Toussaint.

In 1964, the civil rights pioneer was the first black woman to run for Congress in Alabama, and also the first woman to run on the Democratic ticket in the state's history. For her role as a champion of voting rights, she was invited as a special guest to the signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by President Lyndon B. Johnson.

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