Bruce Carver Boynton, man who inspired the 1961 Freedom Rides, dead at 83

Bruce Carver Boynton, a civil rights pioneer from Alabama who inspired the landmark 1961 Freedom Rides, has died. He was 83.

Bruce Carver Boynton is a civil rights icon

Boynton was arrested 60 years ago for entering the white part of a racially segregated bus station in Virginia which launched a chain reaction that ultimately helped abolish Jim Crow laws in the South.

He challenged his conviction, and his appeal resulted in a U.S. Supreme Court decision that prohibited bus station segregation and helped inspire the “Freedom Rides.”

Despite his pivotal role, Boynton was not as well known as other civil rights figures. Though, both Boynton’s mother and father were early civil rights activists. His mother, Amelia Boynton Robinson, was brutally beaten while demonstrating for voting rights in 1965 and was honored by then-President Barack Obama 50 years later.

“He did something that very few people would have the courage to do. He said no,” U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson said of Boynton in 2018. “To me he’s on a par with Rosa Parks,” the Black woman who refused to give up her bus seat to a white man.”

His experience

In an interview with the Associated Press, Boynton described his experience:

Boynton was attending law school at Howard University in Washington, D.C., when he boarded a bus bound for Alabama in 1958. Public facilities including bus stations were separated by race across the South at the time, despite federal laws banning segregation in interstate travel.

The bus pulled into a station in Richmond, Virginia, for a break, and Boynton went inside to eat. Seeing that the part of the restaurant meant for blacks had water on the floor and looked “very unsanitary,” Boynton said he sat down in the “clinically clean” white area. He told the waitress he would have a cheeseburger and tea.

“She left and came back with the manager. The manager poked his finger in my face and said … move,’” using a racial slur, Boynton recalled in the interview. “And I knew that I would not move, and I refused to, and that was the case.”

Case went before the Supreme Court

Convicted of trespassing, Boynton appealed and his case went before the Supreme Court. Thurgood Marshall, then the nation’s leading civil rights attorney and later on to become the first Black Supreme Court justice, was his counsel.

Boynton contested his conviction and the Supreme Court ruled in 1960 that federal discrimination prohibitions barring segregation on interstate buses also applied to bus stations and other facilities linked to interstate travel. The next year, dozens of black and white students set out on buses to travel the South and test whether the ruling in the case, Bruce Boynton v. Virginia, was being followed.

Boynton paid a price for his noble efforts, and initially wasn’t able to get a law license in Alabama. He spent most of his career as a civil rights attorney before retirement.

Thompson said in 2018 that Boynton’s 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.”