Amelia Boynton Robinson grew up in an era when black Americans were banned from drinking from “white” water fountains and sitting near the front on buses.
Cops used high-voltage cattle prods to move them on and the racist, murderous Ku Klux Klan reigned supreme.
On March 7, 1965, Amelia and 600 others tried to march from the dirt-poor town of Selma to Alabama’s state capital Montgomery.
They were protesting at yet another shocking injustice – African Americans being denied the right to vote.
Just outside Selma, they were attacked by state troopers.
Amelia was beaten unconscious by a policeman and tear gas filled her eyes and throat.
As she slumped lifeless to the ground a sheriff gloated that she’d been dumped for “buzzards to eat”.
The horrifying image of the petite 52-year-old widow in the arms of a fellow protester flashed around the world – and helped secure voting reform.
But half a century on from what became known as Bloody Sunday, Amelia is still fighting for true equality.
She hopes Selma – the highly-acclaimed new film about Martin Luther King’s civil rights battle – will help her cause.
Now 103, she believes its release could not have come at a more fitting time as protests continue in America over the deaths of black men at the hands of police.
“Only until all human beings begin to recognise themselves as human beings will prejudice be gone for ever,” says the former school teacher.
“People ask me what race I am but there is no such thing as race. I just answer, ‘I’m a member of the human race’.
"It’s important that young people know about the struggles we faced to get to the point we are at today.
“Only then will they appreciate the hard-won freedom of blacks in this country.”
Selma has been nominated for four Golden Globes, including a best actor nod for British star David Oyelowo as Dr King, and is a hot contender to win best film at the Oscars on February 22.
Released here on Friday, it centres around Bloody Sunday and two other marches, organised around Amelia’s kitchen table in Selma.
Segregation laws in the Deep South meant it was even illegal for more than two black people to walk together in the street.
Mum-of-two Amelia recalls: “There were so many restrictions – you weren’t allowed to drink from the ‘white’ water fountain and police officers would pace the streets, pushing the coloured people with cattle prods.”
Half the 30,000 people who lived in Selma were black but only 156 could vote.
In 1932 Amelia was one of the first to register – after passing literacy tests, going through ludicrous red-tape and paying fees beyond the reach of many people.
She campaigned to change local voting rules and soon came to the attention of Dr King and other national civil rights leaders.
Like Dr King, Amelia advocated non-violent acts of civil disobedience and when she set off at the head of the march she says she was “not looking for notoriety.”
She vividly recalls the line of police waiting for them on a bridge.
“They were like tin soldiers, with billy clubs, wearing gas masks,” she says.
"When they charged the crowd, whacking people with whips, batons and rubber tubes covered in barbed wire, Amelia stood motionless.
She says: “I think I was frozen. It was not because of fear. It was amazement, of people being beaten. I saw blood on the highway, I saw people falling.
"An officer on horseback hit me across the back of the shoulders and on the back of the neck. I lost consciousness.”
Amelia later found out that a second officer then pumped tear gas into her eyes and throat before leaving her for dead.
A young stranger dragged her lifeless body to a waiting ambulance. She was taken to hospital with severe throat burns and bruising.
Two days later, when she discharged herself from hospital to join Dr King on a second march to Montgomery, she learnt her face had been seen around the world.
International disgust spurred President Lyndon B Johnson into changing the law.
Five months later, on August 6, 1965, he invited Amelia to the White House when he signed the Voting Rights Act.
She found herself addressing the United Nations, meeting world leaders and travelling around the globe to promote equal rights.
In 2007 she even attended the funeral of Selma Sheriff Jim Clark – the man who gloated that if she was dead she should be left as food for buzzards.
Clark, who wore a badge saying “never” to indicate his views on black people voting, dressed in a military uniform and ran a lawless posse of 200 men.
Oprah Winfrey, who is one of Selma’s producers, also has a role in the film as activist Annie Lee Cooper.
She says she took the part because Cooper stood up to Clark, punching him in the face after he prodded her with a baton.
The talk show host says: “She didn’t just hit him for herself. She hit him for everybody.”Her old home in Selma, where she and Dr King planned the three 54-mile walks to Montgomery, has fallen into disrepair.
Oprah agrees with Amelia about the timing of the film, and the recent demos against police brutality.
“I think it’s a wonderful thing that people are protesting,” she says. “People are awake. There’s never not divine timing. It’s just a matter of, ‘Are you paying attention?’
“So I think this movie gets people’s attention because people are walking across the bridge (in Selma), as people are marching in Berkeley, as people are marching in Downtown Manhattan.”
Amelia was not well enough to attend early US screenings of the film but she plans to attend the 50th anniversary of the Selma protest next month.
“I’ll be there,” she says. “And I’ll be holding my head up high.”
But the road it is in has been renamed after Amelia and her first husband Sam, who died in 1963.
Ten years ago a monument in her honour was unveiled at the bridge where she was beaten. And there’s a road sign in her name outside her current bungalow in Tuskegee.
Her basement is a museum of civil rights memorabilia and proudly displays framed newspaper cuttings and photographs on the walls.
She invited actress Lorraine Toussaint, who plays her in Selma, to visit her to help with research for the role.
Lorraine, 54, says she was blown away by Amelia and spurred on to teach her 10-year-old daughter about civil rights.
“I wanted to make sure that my daughter knows that she can make a difference, that it’s important to speak out when there’s wrong, when there’s an injustice,” she says.
“Evil only propagates when we are silent. Our voices matter and I wanted my daughter to know that.”
Instead of wearing a gown to the film’s New York premiere, the Orange is the New Black star wore an “I can’t breathe” T-shirt.
Those were the last words of New Yorker Eric Garner, 43, who died after police put him in a chokehold on July 17 last year.
Lorraine, who took her daughter on a recent protest march in Manhattan, adds: “She (Amelia) was one of the more outspoken civil rights speakers.
She invited Martin Luther King to come to Selma and set up Selma as the battleground for the Voting Rights Act.
“I’m so honoured to play her.”
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