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Alabama’s civil rights attorney and first black special prosecutor died earlier this week in Selma from cancer, according to former Alabama state senator Hank Sanders, a friend of Boynton.
Boynton’s place in the Freedom Rides movement began in 1958 while a student at Howard University Law School in Washington, DC.
Traveling on a bus bound for Alabama, Boynton was out to eat when the bus pulled up for a break in Richmond, Virginia.
He said he sat in the “clinically clean” white area of the restaurant after seeing the neglected “Blacks” section. He placed his order with the waitress.
“She left and came back with the manager. The manager put his finger in my face and said… ‘move’,” Boynton recalls in his interview. “And I knew I wasn’t going to move, and I refused, and I was.”
Boynton was later convicted of trespassing, but then challenged his conviction with his lawyer Thurgood Marshall, who later became the first black Supreme Court justice. The appeal sparked the landmark United States Supreme Court decision in Boynton v. Virginia. In a 7-2 decision in 1960, the court prohibited racial segregation in bus stations.
The case ignited the Freedom Rides movement in 1961, as black and white civil rights activists boarded buses for cities in the Deep South to protest the separate buses and stations.
Boynton’s death came less than two weeks before the 60th anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling that changed his life and many more.
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