In 1934, Amelia Boynton registered to vote, which was extremely difficult for African Americans to accomplish in Alabama, due to discriminatory practices under the state's disenfranchising constitution passed at the turn of the century. It had effectively excluded most blacks from politics for decades, an exclusion that continued into the 1960s. A few years later she wrote a play, "Through the Years", which told the story of the creation of Spiritual music and a former slave who was elected to Congress during Reconstruction, based on her father's half-brother Robert Smalls, in order to help fund a community center in Selma, Alabama. In 1954, the Boyntons met Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., and his wife, Coretta Scott King at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, where King was the pastor.