Johnny Robinson (1947–1963) was a young African-American teenager who, at age 16, was shot and killed by a police officer in the unrest following the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama.
A few years prior to his death, Robinson's father was murdered by a neighbor, leaving his mother alone to raise her children in a city fraught with racial violence.
The incident prompted civil unrest that was further provoked by the shooting deaths of two black children that day: 16-year-old Johnny Robinson, and 13-year-old Virgil Ware.
Ware had been riding on the handlebars of his brother's bicycle when he was shot twice with a revolver by Larry Joe Sims, a white 16-year-old who supported the segregationist movement.
Earlier that day, Sims had joined a fellow teenager, Michael Lee Farley, at the headquarters for the National States' Rights Party and set out to cruise the neighborhood together.
Robinson was about to join his sister for Sunday dinner, but had accompanied his friends to a gas station that was not far from the 16th Street Baptist Church.