[1][4] As a child, he moved twice with his master's household, to Lowndes County, Mississippi, in 1848, and to Claiborne Parish, Louisiana, in 1853.

He used Webster's Blue-Backed Speller and McGuffey's First Reader as texts and hired a white girl to teach him.

In about 1869 or 1870, he enrolled in Bishop College in Marshall, Texas, an American Baptist Home Mission Society school for the education of freed slaves.

In 1896, he resigned from his church positions in Texas and moved to Nashville to establish the National Baptist Publishing Board, arriving there on November 7, 1896.

[2][5] Boyd did not have National Baptist Convention financial support to start the Publishing Board, so he financed its establishment himself, using real estate in Texas that he owned as collateral, and received assistance with printing from the white Southern Baptist Convention, which had its main publishing operations in Nashville.

[2] In 1898, in collaboration with nine other men, Boyd incorporated the National Baptist Publishing Board under a Tennessee state charter.

[7] The board's publications are considered to have played a key role in establishing an African American Baptist religious and racial identity in the United States.

[8] In 1915, the success of the Publishing Board under Boyd's leadership led to a split within the National Baptist Convention.

They represent the intelligent and refined Negro of the day, rather than the type of toy that is usually given to children and, as a rule, used as a scarecrow.

Although the minimum deposit was actually 10 cents, the name "One-Cent" was chosen to emphasize that every customer was important, no matter how little money they had.

Boyd, then head of the local chapter of the National Negro Business League, joined with other prominent citizens to promote and formalize the boycott.

Because many blacks needed the streetcar system to travel to and from work, it proved difficult to maintain participation in the boycott.

To help their fellow black citizens avoid using Nashville's public streetcars, Boyd joined with lawyer James C. Napier and funeral home director Preston Taylor to establish a rival black-owned public transit system, the Union Transportation Company.

These vehicles lacked the power needed to climb some of the city's hills, so the company acquired a fleet of 14 electric buses.

To avoid buying electricity from a white-owned utility, the transportation company powered the buses with a generator in the basement of the Publishing Board building.

[7][17] The corporation and the R. H. Boyd Family Endowment Fund offer fellowships in his name for African-Americans engaged in graduate study.