Amelia Boynton Robinson Interviewed on November 19, 2005

HUNTLEY: Test one, two, three. Test one, two, three. Test one, two, three. Test one, two, three. Test one, two, three. Test four, five, six. Test, four, five, six. Test four, five, six. Test four, five, six. Test four, five, six.

HUNTLEY: With us today [inaudible 00:01:24]

ROBINSON: And I [inaudible 00:01:35] I was looking forward to this day that I may come here.

HUNTLEY: That's right.

ROBINSON: The pleasure is all mine.

HUNTLEY: Thank you. Thank you. Just want to get a few tidbits today. Let me just ask you, were you born in Alabama?

ROBINSON: No, I was born in Savannah, Georgia. And my mother and father, Mr. and Mrs. George Platts lived there and had 10 children and I happened to be the seventh of the ten.

HUNTLEY: And how much education that your parents have?

ROBINSON: Frankly speaking, my father went as far as the third grade, but he was one of the greatest mathematicians that you could find anywhere. He even stunted the people who he had... he actually tested them because he was a contractor. 00:01:00They called them builders in those days. And he also had a wholesale and retail wood yard. And he would have to go out and find the number of trees that he wanted and have them cut and brought to, well in the form of cord wood. And he had a daughter going to Georgia state college and he told her, "Now I... how many cords of wood can I get out of a tree that is 75 feet?" I'm just taking these figures. "75 feet tall, maybe 33 feet in diameter and 20 feet in circumference. How many cords of wood can I get out of it?" And he gave her a 00:02:00chance to figure it out. She took it to school and then she asked the teacher, "Is this right?" And the teacher said yes and brought it back. My father said, "No, that's not right. What you do..." And again, I'm just using figures. "What you do, you multiply the height by the circumference by such and such a thing and divided by the height or by the diameter and you get the number of cords that you're supposed to get out of it."

ROBINSON: He was a genius. And my mother, both of them came from South Carolina, different parts. My father from Sumter, my mother from Buford, South Carolina, and she went to school as high as the 10th grade.

HUNTLEY: And so did you grow up in Savannah?

ROBINSON: Yes. I grew up in Savannah. I attended the public schools there. I went to Georgia state college and I graduated from Tuskegee at that time, Tuskegee Institute.

HUNTLEY: Well my wife graduated from Tuskegee.

ROBINSON: Is that so?

HUNTLEY: My daughter graduated from Tuskegee.

ROBINSON: Wonderful.

HUNTLEY: I have sown a lot of money to Tuskegee.

ROBINSON: That's the pride of the [inaudible 00:05:10] south.

HUNTLEY: Absolutely. You of course most noted for your activity in Selma, but you are obviously pretty active even before Selma and voting rights and property ownership. Can you talk just a bit about that?

ROBINSON: Well, first I came out of a family that was... my mother was an activist. She was a civil rights activist before the name came in and 1920 or 00:04:0021, when women were given the right to vote, she had a horse and buggy, and she would take with her. We would go from one house to the other. She would get the women out and take them down to the registration office. And when it was time to vote, she would take them there. And she was very active in civil rights before we knew anything about it. When I graduated from Tuskegee, I was given a position, employed by the United States Department of Agriculture. And I worked with the people on the farm as a home demonstration agent, and the people were 00:05:00just a cut above slavery. So my work was cut out for me there, and I married a man who was a County agent and we had to, in fact, we got the people off of the farm, which of course cause us to be looked upon as disturbing that way of life. And we had charge of the 4-H club and the adult clubs.

ROBINSON: Then we told them that you're not really a first class citizen until you become a registered voter. And for 30 years before the mass ruining of the civil rights struggle that we had, we worked almost single handedly to get the people where they could register. And of course they did, they were 80 somewhat 00:06:00registered voters when we went to Selma and I ran for Congress. And during that time in 1964, before Dr. King came into Selma, there were around 1035 registered voters and the whole district of eight counties. The whites had... they were eight. Yes, a thousand somehow, the whites had 100,000 some odd registered voters. And I got some 10.7% of the votes ever cast, which meant I got votes from the whites as well as the blacks.

HUNTLEY: So when you initially was the home demonstration agent for the 00:07:00agriculture department, were you initially assigned to Dallas County?

ROBINSON: Yes, Selma is a county seat of Dallas County.

HUNTLEY: So you became then, you and your husband then became outside agitators I'm sure.

ROBINSON: Definitely so, that's mildly saying it because if you were born in the South and if you have heard your forefathers or people in your family who lived on the farm, they can tell you some stories that would make your blood curdle almost of the treatment of the people on the plantations. And so we worked with people on plantations because most of the people in Dallas County lived on the 00:08:00plantations. And the plantation owners in most cases are those who were descendants of the slave owners, and of course they tried to treat them the same way that their forefathers treated the slaves.

HUNTLEY: How did you get this job as home demonstration agent?

ROBINSON: You know that's something that makes me realize the importance of young people trying to walk a straight line. There was a home demonstration agent, no she was the state demonstration agent in Savannah, Georgia, she married a man who was the state agent in Alabama-

HUNTLEY: Were they black?

ROBINSON: Yes, and I saw her only once during the years I was at Tuskegee. Then when they needed agents in Alabama, her husband said, "Now we've got a tough county here and it's hard to keep an agent and I don't have anybody to send there." At that time I had graduated from Tuskegee and I was teaching at Americas Institute just a year after I had graduated and she said-

HUNTLEY: America's Georgia?

ROBINSON: America's Georgia yes... and his wife, who was the state agent when I was a 4-H club girl in Savannah, Georgia said, "You know, I've been watching a little girl from Savannah and I have been keeping up with her and I think she would make a good home demonstration agent." Now I'm thinking how the youth go 00:10:00about, and they don't realize people are watching them. And from the statement that she made, I became the home demonstration agent.

HUNTLEY: What were the responsibilities of a home demonstration agent? What did you do?

ROBINSON: What were the possibilities?

HUNTLEY: The position, what kind of work did you do?

ROBINSON: Oh, I worked in the homes, teaching people scientifically how to prepare their foods, how to take care of their babies, how to clean and take care of their homes and small things like in the event that they become sick, how to direct them to the various doctors. And I was supposed to teach them gardening, but they knew more about it than I did. I was not raised on the farm, 00:11:00I was raised in the city. And those people taught me a whole lot and I tell people so often, I got my PHD through what the people in the rural district knew because they certainly knew more than I did. I had the book knowledge, but they had the practice.

HUNTLEY: Did you live in the rural area?

ROBINSON: No, I lived in Selma.

HUNTLEY: You did live in Selma-

ROBINSON: Because you see the County, Dallas County is 700 plus square miles. And we had to have these meetings all over the County, more than one place. So that means we had at least 20 or more communities where we worked, and we would 00:12:00have monthly meetings in each one of these. We had charts of the 4-H club and we had to work also with the adults.

HUNTLEY: Tell them about bloody Sunday.

ROBINSON: Oh, bloody Sunday. It was very cool, rainy day, well, a misty day rather than rainy. And that was because of the fact that... it started I think when I was arrested for walking down the street and I was a political prisoner and Dr. Kane and his staff went to the house and tried to strategize what they were going to do about it, because they felt that citizens were being arrested 00:13:00for no reason whatsoever. And it happened before they decided what they were going to do. A young man from Marin, Alabama, which was just 30 miles from us, was shot in the back and killed by state trooper. And Dr. Kane said that we're going to March to Montgomery and have a conference with the governor and demand that he protect the citizens.

ROBINSON: So that Sunday, March the seventh, 1965, we left the church. And Lewis, John Lewis and Hosea Williams were leading and I was second when we left 00:14:00the church, and a friend of mine, two women who were working feverously because my husband had passed. And we walked on through the city and there was a bridge known as Edmund Pettus Bridge that spans the Alabama river. When we crossed the river, we saw these men, state troopers with gas masks on, cattle prods and clubs. And when we got across that, we just wondered, what are these people doing? We actually didn't realize why would these people were standing there? 00:15:00And Hosea Williams who was walking with John Lewis walked on up and the person who had charge of the state troopers said, "Don't go any farther. Turn around and go back to your church or your home." And Hosea said, "May I have something to say?" "No, you may not have anything to say. Charge on them men."

ROBINSON: And they came from the right, they came from the left. Some few of them who were in front came from the front and all have these State troopers began to beat the people. Now there are perhaps 700 people who left the... some of them had not even left the church, but there was a line of people marching from the church to where we were. And they started beating them. At first, they 00:16:00pushed me and I got up. And when I got up I saw the people running and they were beating them because we were in front... Beating them, they fell out and they continued to beat them. Some of them I saw getting up just limping away because of the fact that they had... some of them had broken bones and I saw the blood on the highway.

ROBINSON: I was actually frozen. I just could not imagine human beings being treated like that. And I was stunned. And I looked around just about everybody was gone. And one of the state troopers came up to me and he said... he hit me right across the back and he said, "Run." And I just gave him a dirty look 00:17:00because I didn't see why I should run because I wasn't doing anything wrong. And the second time he hit me was at the base of my neck and I fell to the ground unconsciously. From then on actually it was nothing that I know, but having seen the pictures, having heard the different news media speaking about what happened to me, and because I was unconscious. And the horses one, I understand that they tried to run the horse over me and the horse stepped over me.

ROBINSON: One guy came, and these were the state troopers, one guy came with a canister of tear gas, and began to just pump it over me. And I swallowed a lot 00:18:00of it, which today has changed my voice completely. And I understand that it has sealed my esophagus in such a way that I will always have an obstruction. And one guy just took his nightstick or whatever he had and beat me. Now I've seen that picture, and they used it in the flyer when I was running for office. But the fellow by the name of Bobby Gordon, it wasn't one of his pictures, but he took quite a bit. And nobody tried to help me up but one or two little fellas 00:19:00and then they beat them.

ROBINSON: So someone back on the other side, on the Selma side, who was standing and they found the sheriff Clark, and they said to sheriff Clark... and this fellow's name was Anderson, Morris Anderson. He said, "I've heard there's somebody dead over there and y'all send an ambulance." And he said, "I'm not sending an ambulance anywhere. If anybody is dead over there, let the buzzers eat them." And he said, "If you don't send an ambulance over there, we're going to burn this town down." And they sent an ambulance, picked me up and carried me to the hospital. And I was there for about 30 to 36 hours. And when I became conscious, I said, "Oh, what happened?" And they told me what had happened.

ROBINSON: And of course, I mean, I experienced that. It really gave me a greater motivation, and a greater determination to fight for what we had fought for and got nowhere. What we were fighting for in Selma to get people to get their right to vote. The meetings that we have had, they are... the types of applications that they had, which were 10 pages long and 10 questions on each page. And I said to myself that I'm going to fight because my husband lost his life fighting for them. They didn't shoot him. They tried to. They shot in the house and broke the big plate glass window. The telephone became a nuisance from seven o'clock 00:21:00in the evening until around seven at night saying, "Get out of town. Your house is going to be bombed. You'd better not be seen on the street."

ROBINSON: And of course he had retired because of his health, which he had a number of strokes, and he lost his life because of the fact that a man came into the office to beat him. And when he... it happened that I was in his office and when he raised the cane to do it, why I grabbed the cane, but he went to the hospital for the last time and it never came out alive.

ROBINSON: So all of these things made me more determined to carry out what we started; to make every legal a first class citizen by having them to become 00:22:00registered voters. To this day, I continue to be motivated because we are working with young people. Young people from 18 to around 25 or 27 years of age. We are in the political field now pulling the cover off of Cheney and off of even the poor president who in many cases, he doesn't know what's going on. But what's going on now in Washington, the group that I'm working with are responsible for it. We're putting out millions not thousands of pieces of literature, and we've been able to expose what Cheney has done, what Libby has done and the others. So when we get through, we're going to clean up Washington DC.

HUNTLEY: This is the Schiller Institute?

ROBINSON: Schiller Institute and this is a-

HUNTLEY: Tell me how did you get involved with the Schiller Institute?

ROBINSON: You know, I believe in God and though things may happen and we can't understand it, it happens for a purpose. My husband and I were married for four... this is my second husband for four and a half years. The civil rights bill had been passed. The voting rights act had been passed. And I met this guy from New York city and we were on a trip. We just figured that, well, all of this is behind now, we will just enjoy life. We were senior citizens and we just put everything behind us. And we were with a friend of mine who had planned a 00:24:00trip to the Fast Ski, now the Fast Ski, it's an Island where people are on there. Their ancestors were brought there and for a generations, they were still on this Island.

HUNTLEY: Where is this Island located?

ROBINSON: Beg your pardon?

HUNTLEY: Where is it located?

ROBINSON: This is the Fast Ski that is around 15 miles away from Savannah, Georgia. And the only way you could get there was by a boat. And she had a program in Selma known as... a radio program known as the women's world.

HUNTLEY: who had the radio?

ROBINSON: This lady was the wife of a doctor we had there whose name was Maddox, her name was Gloria Maddox. And she asked me what I liked to go because they were going to spend the night in Savannah. And I said, "Sure." knowing that I 00:25:00still had a few friends who were living there. So she had made all of our arrangements with one of the captains. And when we got to Savannah, he said that all of his boats were out, but I'll put you in care of a man who lives on the Fast Ski Island. And we went down to the arena and he put us in charge of this guy. And the boat was around 15 or 16 feet long. And there were six of us. And we started out, and there were certain places that I recognized because we would go down what we call down the river on picnics.

ROBINSON: And we had just passed the waving girl that I spoke of in the past where the big boats come from Boston, from Massachusetts, New York, Glen into 00:26:00Savannah, and they would come into the river from the ocean. We had just passed that specific place when a large boat disrespecting the small craft just went through the water and the first wake or wave almost filled the boat with water, and the second turned it over. And here we were trying to... the thing about it, we didn't have on life-jackets and we could not swim. And this water, the temperature was 42 degrees. We were rushed away from water all except Gloria, the one who had the program and my husband and they were holding onto the boat.

ROBINSON: I saw the man who owned the boat with his head down, but he had on a life jacket. And I knew that there was no way that he could survive. And every time a wave would come, it would wash us farther away from the boat. And my husband kept on saying, "Are you all right?" And I said, "Yes." I knew he was all right because he was holding onto the boat.

HUNTLEY: How were you staying afloat?

ROBINSON: God sent his angels to hold me up. That was the only thing. One that was also in the boat and she said, "Oh Boynton, don't let me drown. Don't let me drown God. Don't let me drown." It's the funniest thing, I had no fear that I would drown. I kept on saying to God that I can't afford to drown, I have too much to do. And I can constantly say that and I wasn't thinking about what I had 00:28:00to do because I didn't know. And who am I? A boat came about, they said it was 20 minutes. So we were in that water not being able to swim. And this is a big river where the big boats come into that river, going to Savannah. And I didn't hear his voice anymore.

ROBINSON: And when they began to pick us up, there was a small boat coming from the Hilton Head Island. They had these students from eight years old, 15 and they were on an ecology trip. And one of them saw us. One of them said, "look at that stuff in the water." And another one said, "Well, it has life." And then 00:29:00the boat came to us, picked us up and carried us to the hospital in Hilton Head Island. And the first thing I said was, "Where's my husband?" They said, "We haven't found him." The boat went down and he went down too.

ROBINSON: Now he was an electronic technician. He lived in New York until we married. And he came down, and he brought all of this expensive equipment. And later on I asked somebody in Tuskegee to find somebody to evaluate this material that he had, this equipment. And the lady told me that, "I found somebody." And it happened to be a man whom I remembered 50 years previously when I was in school. And I said to him when he came up, "Are you an electronic technician?" He said, "No, the guy couldn't come. And I didn't want to disappoint you so I came."

ROBINSON: We talked awhile and in the talking I expressed the fact that I was having some interior decoration done in the house, and the man had left, and he said the man had gone to Cincinnati and just left the work half done. And he said, "Well, if he doesn't come back, I'll come back and I'll finish it for you." And he came back and he finished it. And I asked him how much it was, he said... you want me to stop?

HUNTLEY: Just one second. Okay so he came back.

ROBINSON: "I'm not charging you anything, will you marry me?" And I thought he 00:31:00was joking and out of the clear skies, I said, "Uh-huh." So he went on back to Tuskegee and got the ring and the minister and the license, and we were married. Now I like to travel. And he said, "let's go to New York to the Shriner's meeting." Now he wasn't a Shriner. And I said, "Okay." So we went to the Shriner's meeting and we couldn't get in the Shriner's meeting, but we were looking at the displays of the various components. And a guy came up to me and he started talking, and I wondered why was he talking to me instead of my husband? But I heard him when he said, "And we have a blueprint to put water across the Sahara desert and cause it to bloom again."

ROBINSON: And I thought about California and how it was arid and how it had no water, and they built it up. And I said, "Well, if my husband were living, he would approve or something like that." Then he said, "We have now a section of the city of New York where we're trying to drive drugs out of it." And he invited me to come to this meeting that they were going to have with the people in that particular area or community. And I invited him to come to Tuskegee where my husband and I were in charge of the tourists. And then he invited me to go to a meeting that they had in Virginia and I had never heard, with exception of what he said, I had never known anybody by the name of Lyndon LaRouche. But 00:33:00when he told about the program and when I heard him speak, I saw that he was political, he was an economist. And the things that he was doing instead of working with his people, he was working with everybody internationally.

ROBINSON: And the program is one, just what we are doing now politically. We have pulled the cover off of chaining, off of all of the people who were backing the president, and we are exposing what's happening with the wall, with the beginning of the wall. And I began to realize, when I told God that I had something to do and had nothing to do, he gave it to me and that is to work with Schiller Institute, which is the name of the organization and the LaRouche Youth 00:34:00movement. And I don't get tired. That's one thing. I like what I'm doing and I don't get tired because I'm seeing the result. The youth movement is made up of young people, young people who want to do something and who want to be somebody.

ROBINSON: And many of those young people have been in drugs. Many of them have been at a crossroad because they didn't know what way to turn. Many of them are people from broken homes or from foster homes and they want to be somebody and want to do something. And when I have some of them come up to me and say that, "I was going... I was on the wrong path, I was in drugs and now I seen that it was destructive. And I have come into this organization and when I hear you 00:35:00talk, I feel that I can make it and I'm going to make it." And it makes me feel good. And I tell them that you give me more than I give you because you give me the determination to continue to do what I do and even give me youth because it's not how I look. I feel a hundred percent better than I look. So they really helped me quite a bit.

ROBINSON: And I think when I told God that I had too much, I feel as though he is actually helping me to do the thing that shows that we can't lay down and die because of age. And he gives me the strength to continue to go on.

HUNTLEY: Well, Mrs. Robinson I want to thank you for taking your time. I could 00:36:00sit here and talk with you and listen to you for hours on hours. We know that you've had a long flight and you need to probably get some rest before the event this evening. So I just want to thank you for all that you've done and all that you're doing.

ROBINSON: Thank you. When I leave here, I'm going to Oakland to a group of young people there who are expecting me. Yesterday I went to two of the universities and of course I got back rather late and sat up and talked and the fact that I had almost no sleep. I slept on the plane. And when I leave here tomorrow, I'll fly into Oakland and then I come back to Los Angeles. Then I live out of Los Angeles a day afterward, and I'm going directly to Rome where my book has been 00:37:00printed in the Italian language. And they are planning on having some type of public service there. Then from there to Germany and I don't know where else.

HUNTLEY: So you're going out on tour then?

ROBINSON: Yes.

HUNTLEY: That's great. Again, thank you so much for your time.

ROBINSON: You're welcome.

HUNTLEY: Hopefully I'll be able to do this again sometime when we have more time.

ROBINSON: Okay.

HUNTLEY: Thank you so much.

ROBINSON: All right.