Monday afternoon was supposed to be a joyous occasion in Selma, as a ceremony was planned to rename the Dallas County Courthouse in honor of civil rights heroes Bruce Carver Boynton and J.L. Chestnut.
But in a tragic stroke of fate, Boynton succumbed to cancer at a Montgomery hospital Monday morning at the age of 83, according to his daughter, Carver Boynton.
“There is a sadness. His was a tremendous life well lived. We’re happy he’s no longer in pain but I’m also amazed at his fight and his strength and that he continued to fight and write even after the initial diagnosis of cancer,” she told AL.com Monday evening.
“From being a student in law school until his passing, he really dedicated his life to civil rights and defending the rights of others.”
A longtime attorney in his hometown of Selma, Boynton secured his place in U.S. history via his role in the civil rights movement.
In 1958, while he was in his final year at Washington, D.C.’s Howard University Law School, he was arrested in Richmond, Va., for refusing to leave a “whites-only” section of a bus station restaurant. The arrest set into motion a series of events that would ultimately result in the overturning of Jim Crow laws across the South.
Boynton and his lawyer, Thurgood Marshall – who would soon go on to become the first Black U.S. Supreme Court justice – went to court to challenge the segregation prohibitions and the trespassing conviction Boynton received for his refusal to leave.
The case went to the Supreme Court, which ruled in 1960 that federal prohibitions barring segregation on interstate buses also applied to bus stations and other interstate travel facilities.
The 7-2 decision in Boynton v. Virginiaspurred the “Freedom Rides” movement the following year, in which students rode buses throughout the South to determine whether the law was being applied. Freedom Riders were attacked and arrested in southern states including Alabama, where one of their buses was infamously burned in Anniston.
And yet, Boynton – whose middle name was Carver, in honor of his godfather, George Washington Carver – never achieved the fame of other Alabama-born civil rights leaders like Rosa Parks or John Lewis, his attorney, Marshall, or even his parents, Amelia and S.W.
Amelia Boynton died five years ago at the age of 110, but is remembered as the “mother” of the modern voting rights movement for her accomplishments over several decades to advancing the causes of voting and civil rights. She made a long string of contributions including inviting Martin Luther King, Jr. to Selma in 1963, being beaten by state troopers in Selma on Bloody Sunday in 1965, and later for co-founding the National Voting Rights Museum and annual Bridge Crossing Jubilee in Selma.
“It’s wonderful that he’s being recognized. I wish we could have done it sooner. I do appreciate the community and the recognition and the honors,” Carver Boynton, who lives in Birmingham, said Monday.
“He had a tremendous contribution that sometimes is not often recognized because he’s the son of Amelia and S.W. Boynton, who both had such significant contributions to civil rights. But his case was ground-breaking, and it paved the way for the desegregation of all lunch counters.”
U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson, the second black federal judge to serve in Alabama, spoke about Boynton’s legacy in an interview with the Associated Press before a May 2018 event Thompson helped plan in Montgomery to honor Boynton and his role in civil rights history.
“I think you can clearly say that he pretty much led to the Freedom Rides movement, but he’d never been acknowledged,” Thompson said at the time.
“His life is a teaching lesson for all of us about how we can make a difference … All he wanted was a cheeseburger, and he changed the course of history.”
Boynton also spoke with the AP in 2018, a month before the commemorative event.
“I am very happy that at this stage of my life that there is this type of recognition,” Boynton said.
Boynton faced professional retribution for his willingness to stand up against a discriminatory system. Though he got a high score on the Alabama bar, he was unable to obtain a law license in the state for several years “as a direct consequence of his Virginia arrest,” according to the Selma Center for Nonviolence, Truth & Reconciliation. So he went to Tennessee to practice until he received his law license in Alabama in 1966.
“He worked to desegregate schools in the state of Tennessee when his law license was held up here in Alabama because of the arrest and refusing to move at the lunch counter and the case,” Carver Boynton said Monday. “Because of that controversy, the state held up his law license, even though he had already passed the bar.”
Bruce Boynton had a long legal career – which even continued sporadically after his “official” retirement two or three years ago, according to Carver – centered on defending civil rights and the wrongly accused. Over the course of his life, he defended Stokely Carmichael, served as Alabama’s first black special prosecutor and was beaten by a county sheriff. At one point, he worked for a number of years as an attorney in Washington, D.C., before returning to Selma to continue his legal efforts in this state.
Michael Jackson, the district attorney for Alabama’s 4th Judicial Circuit and a close friend and colleague of Boynton’s, mourns his loss.
“We are starting to lose all of our civil rights giants. He was a great attorney and a great man,”
Jackson, who is the second black man to serve as a district attorney in Alabama, told AL.com Monday evening. “He was a formidable opponent in the courthouse when he was on the opposite side on a case.”
Boynton is survived by two daughters and his second wife Betty, who lives in Selma. His family has not yet made decisions about funeral arrangements, Carver Boynton said.
https://www.al.com/news/2020/11/ala...vFgFNJNcZF-YRuhCdaNwIIT2eSrt-r-5WBw63IAbF31vI
