Civil rights activist

Born: August 18, 1911;

Died: August 26, 2015

Amelia Boynton Robinson, who has died aged 104, was a US civil rights activist and the first black woman to run for Congress in Alabama.

At the height of the civil rights struggle, she invited Martin Luther King Jr to participate in a march for voting rights in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 and was badly beaten and gassed during the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on what became known as Bloody Sunday. A newspaper photograph of her lying unconscious in the street drew wide attention to the movement.

Fifty years later, Barack Obama, the first black US president, walked with Robinson as she was pushed across the bridge in a wheelchair during anniversary commemorations in March.

Born in Savannah, Georgia, Robinson used to help her mother distribute leaflets calling for women's suffrage and worked as a teacher and in insurance while becoming involved in the civil rights movement.

She became a registered voter in 1932 and ran for Congress at a time when many blacks were barred from voting by state and local authorities. She was ultimately unsuccessful in gaining a seat, but she did achieve 11 per cent of the vote, a remarkable figure considering how few blacks were registered.

In January, she attended the State of the Union address as a special guest of Terri Sewell, who said Robinson's 1964 run for Congress paved the way for her to become Alabama's first elected black congresswoman.

Sewell said Robinson had refused to be intimidated and ultimately saw the impact of her work when the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was signed into law. Robinson was invited as a guest of honour to attend the signing by President Lyndon B Johnson.

Her son Bruce said the civil rights movement was always central to his mother's life. "The truth of it is that was her entire life. That's what she was completely taken with," he said. "She was a loving person, very supportive — but civil rights was her life."

President Obama also paid tribute. "She was as strong, as hopeful, and as indomitable of spirit — as quintessentially American — as I'm sure she was that day 50 years ago," he said. "To honour the legacy of an American hero like Amelia Boynton requires only that we follow her example — that all of us fight to protect everyone's right to vote."

Later in life, Robinson did come to believe that young black people had become apathetic about civil rights and that they had gone, in her words, back to sleep. Her life was featured in the Oscar-nominated film Selma.

She outlived three husbands and is survived by two sons.