Former Alabama state Sen. Hank Sanders, a friend of Boynton, said the civil rights lawyer and Alabama’s first black special prosecutor died of cancer in Selma earlier this week.
Washington D.C. Byton’s place in the Freedom Rides movement began in 1958 when he was a student at Howard University Law School.
While traveling by bus to Alabama, Boynton left for dinner when the bus stopped for a break in Richmond, Virginia.
He said he sat in the restaurant’s “clinically clean” white area after seeing an unwanted “blacks” section. He placed his order with the waitress.
“He walked away and came back with the manager. The manager waved my finger at my face and said … ‘Come on,'” Boynt recalled in his interview, using racial discomfort. “And I knew I couldn’t move, and I refused, and that was the situation.”
Boynton was later convicted of the charges, but his attorney went on to challenge his sentence with Thurgood Marshall, who later became the first black Supreme Court judge. The appeal was filed in Boynton v. Virginia by U.S. The ruling historic ruling of the Supreme Court began. In a 7-2 decision in 1960, the court banned racial segregation of bus stations.
The case sparked the Freedom Rides movement in 1961, as black and white civil rights activists stormed buses in cities in the Deep South to protest separate buses and stations.
Boynton died less than two weeks after the 60th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision, which changed his life and the lives of many others.
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