Civil rights icon Bruce Boynton, whose activism sparked the Freedom Rides, dies age 83
Bruce Boynton, the civil rights activist whose winning U.S. Supreme Court case led to bus-station desegregation and inspired the famous “Freedom Rides” across the nation, has died.
He was 83.
Boynton died on Monday, his friend former Alabama state Sen. Hank Sanders, confirmed to The Associated Press on Tuesday.
Boynton was a law student at Howard University when in 1958 he was arrested in Richmond, Virginia, after refusing to leave the “whites-only” section of a Trailways bus station. He had sat down in the white area of the station to grab a bite to eat during a break in the bus ride because it was clean and the “Blacks only” area wasn’t, he told The Associated Press in 2018.
The waitress walked away and returned with the manager, he told the news wire.
“The manager poked his finger in my face” told him to move, using a racial epithet. “And I knew that I would not move, and I refused to, and that was the case.”
He was convicted of trespassing, appealed and ended up before the Supreme Court. His lawyer was Thurgood Marshall, who would go on to become the first Black Supreme Court justice. Marshall successfully argued the 1960 case that was ruled in Boynton’s favor in a 7–2 decision.
Buses and other interstate transport means were already desegregated, and the decision put bus stations on the list as well.
“He did something that very few people would have the courage to do,” U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson told AP in 2018. “He said no. To me he’s on a par with Rosa Parks.”
Rosa Parks’ 1955 refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama, is credited with helping ignite the civil rights movement.
Boynton, while not as well known as other civil rights figures, was the son of early civil rights activists, AP reported. His mother, Amelia Boynton Robinson, was savagely beaten while demonstrating for voting rights in 1965, and 50 years later was honored by then-President Barack Obama, AP said.
And to think that it all began with a cheeseburger, making Boynton’s life “a teaching lesson for all of us about how we can make a difference,” Sanders marveled to AP. “All he wanted was a cheeseburger, and he changed the course of history.”
Boynton died just shy of the 60th anniversary of the Dec. 5 Supreme Court ruling, the Montgomery Advertiser noted.
“Selma, AL native Attorney Bruce Boynton was a Civil Rights pioneer,” Lisa Demetropoulos Jones, executive director of the Alabama Historical Commission, told the Montgomery Advertiser. “His ardent belief in equality for all led him to stand tall against segregation at a Richmond, VA Trailways Bus Station in December 1958, a decision that would have incredible magnitude and impact.”
With News Wire Services
