Bruce Boynton is a civil rights pioneer most people have never heard of.
History books tell the story of his lawyer Thurgood Marshall, the first black US Supreme Court justice, and Rosa Parks, who wouldn't give up her bus seat to a white man.
Many even recall Boyton's mother, Amelia Boynton Robinson, who was savagely beaten while demonstrating for voting rights in 1965 and was honoured by President Barack Obama 50 years later.
Boynton is largely unknown but admirers are trying to change that.
A black man arrested 60 years ago for entering the white part of a racially segregated bus station in Virginia, Boynton started a chain reaction that helped kill Jim Crow laws in the South.
Boynton contested his conviction, and his appeal resulted in a Supreme Court decision that helped inspire the landmark "Freedom Rides" of 1961.
He will be honoured on May 18 in Montgomery, Alabama.
"All he wanted was a cheeseburger, and he changed the course of history," said US District Judge Myron Thompson, who helped organise the event.
Now 80 and in frail health, Boynton is pleased to have accolades coming his way.
"I am very happy that at this stage of my life that there is this type of recognition," Boynton said during an interview last week at his home in Selma, Alabama.
Boynton was attending law school in Washington, DC, when he boarded a bus for Alabama in 1958. 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, 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 sat down in the "clinically clean" white area and told the waitress he'd have a cheeseburger and tea.
"She left and came back with the manager. The manager poked his finger in my face and said 'Nigger, move,"' said Boynton.
"And I knew that I would not move and I refused to, and that was the case."
Convicted of trespassing, Boynton appealed and his case wound up before the Supreme Court with Marshall, then the nation's leading civil rights attorney, as his counsel.
In a 7-2 decision the court ruled in 1960 that federal discrimination prohibitions barring segregation on interstate buses also applied to bus stations.
The next year, dozens of black and white students set out on buses to travel the South and test whether the law was being followed.
The "Freedom Riders" were arrested or attacked in Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina, and a bus was burned. Then-President John F. Kennedy ordered stricter enforcement of federal anti-discrimination laws.
Boynton's act of defiance was a catalyst for the entire episode, but he didn't get much credit, said Thompson.
"I think you can clearly say that he pretty much led to the Freedom Rides movement, but he'd never been acknowledged. Now is the time to recognise Boynton."
Boynton spent most of his career as a civil rights lawyer before retirement.
