The night before she first walked into Clinton High School in 1956, Jo Ann Allen beamed over her outfit with the excitement of any teenager starting ninth grade.
Her grandmother had sewn the dress — white with a careful trim, pleats and a wide-pressed collar. With her best friend Gail Ann Epps Upton, she buzzed about clothes, classes and making new friends.
Always buoyant, Allen would not have guessed that her daily walk down Foley Hill would soon be met with crowds of jeering segregationists and a bulwark of National Guardsmen. At 14, she was one of the so-called Clinton 12, the first Black students to desegregate a Southern public school following the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education.
“These kids did an adult job, basically facing a firing squad every day,” her daughter-in-law, Libby Boyce, said in an interview. “Jo Ann was so positive and strong through it all. It’s a testament to her and her upbringing.”
Surrounded by family at her Wilshire Vista home, Jo Ann Allen died Wednesday from pancreatic cancer. She was 84.
“She embodied positivity and strength,” said Kamlyn Young, Allen’s daughter. “She was a lover of people. She loved life and always sought to see the good in people through all the adversity.”
Allen, who later married and changed her last name to Boyce, carried that spirit into every chapter of her life — as a pediatric nurse, a member of the family music group The Debs and co-author of, “This Promise of Change: One Girl’s Story in the Fight for School Equality,” which she shared with student audiences across the country.
“We’ve lost such a caring and humble soul. Jo Ann was someone who was so generous with her own story and shared it with people across the country … She inspired everyone she met,” the Green McAdoo Cultural Center, a museum that preserves the legacy of the Clinton 12, said in a statement.
Jo Ann Crozier Allen Boyce was born in the small eastern Tennessee town of Clinton on Sept. 15, 1941. She was the eldest of three children born to Alice Josephine Hopper Allen and Herbert Allen.
She grew up in a modest house with a large kitchen and two bedrooms. Boyce shared a bedroom with her sister, Mamie, that was decorated by their mother with red-robin wallpaper and a small dressing table.
An avid learner from an early age, Boyce was already reading by age 5 when she entered first grade at Green McAdoo School. She credited her parents and her first teacher, Teresa Blair, with nurturing her academic curiosity despite the school’s limited resources.
The Allen family’s life revolved around church. Jo Ann would sing duets with Mamie at services, and looked forward to Friday night fish fries.
After graduating from Green McAdoo, she rode the school bus with her classmates to a school in Knoxville — 20 miles from home.
“There were times during those days that we did not make it to school due to inclement weather or some other untoward event,” she wrote in a biographical post on the McAdoo Center website.
In 1956, Judge Robert Taylor issued the order to integrate Clinton High School following the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Jo Ann and 11 others would become the first Black students to attend.
“When we started school, there were only a few people around. And I thought maybe, ‘Well, they’re just here to be curious,’ ” Boyce recalled in a 1956 television interview.
But the next day, segregationists — whipped into a frenzy by Ku Klux Klan member John Kasper — crowded the entrance of Clinton High.
At Clinton High, most people were kind and curious, Boyce said. But others tormented the 12 children inside — shoving them in hallways, stepping on their heels, leaving threatening notes and even putting tacks on Boyce’s chair.
“I began to think, ‘Maybe they aren’t going to accept us like I thought they were,’ ” Boyce recalled in the interview. “They looked so mean. They looked like they just wanted to grab us and throw us out. They didn’t want us at all. I could just see the hate in their hearts.”
Violence escalated in Clinton when Kasper was arrested for violating a restraining order meant to keep him away from the school. His followers, incensed, mobbed the small town. They toppled cars with Black drivers, assaulted a pastor who preached against prejudice and beat Upton’s boyfriend as he returned to town from a military deployment. Herbert Allen was arrested and later released for defending the family home from cross-burning Klansmen one night.
The chaos prompted then-Tennessee Gov. Frank Clement to order the National Guard to Clinton to restore peace.
But enough was enough. Alice Allen decided it was time for the family to leave Tennessee.
“And what my mother said, we did,” Boyce said in an interview with CBS Los Angeles in 2023.
On a winter morning in 1957, local journalists interviewed the family before they piled into a car bound for Los Angeles.
“We’re not leaving here with hatred in our hearts against anyone,” Herbert Allen said. “Even those who are against us … we realize that those people are just misled. They were trained and brought up that way.”
The camera now on Boyce, she spoke softly. She talked about the A’s and a B she’d earned that semester, declaring she had “accomplished something.”
The previous five months had been the most painful of her life, she later said.
“She felt cheated,” Young told The Times. “She wanted to stay and graduate to show everyone that she could do it in spite of everything. She was always of the mind that love will conquer all. That’s what guided her through the rest of her life.”
Clinton High was largely reduced to rubble in a bombing in 1958. Nobody was arrested.
Only two of the Clinton 12 would graduate from the school.
The Allen family joined relatives already living in California. Boyce entered Dorsey High School in Baldwin Hills and graduated in 1958. She later attended Los Angeles City College before enrolling in nursing school.
She became a pediatric nurse, and worked in the field for decades.
“She always played the underdog, and she loved kids,” Young said.
Music tugged at her, too. In Los Angeles, she formed a vocal trio with her sister Mamie and cousin Sandra called The Debs, briefly singing backup for Sam Cooke. Later, she performed jazz sets across the city from cabaret stages to the historic Hollywood Roosevelt hotel.
In 1959, she met Victor Boyce at a dance, and he “stole her away” from the partner she’d been dancing with, the family recalled. The couple were later married, and remained so for 64 years, raising three children and generations of extended family, including the actor Cameron Boyce, who died in 2019.
His many fans would call her “Nana,” the title given to Boyce by her grandchildren.
Even as she endured breast cancer, a major stroke and later pancreatic cancer, her signature optimism never left her.
“She would come in and just light up the room,” Libby Boyce said. “She had a sparkle like nobody’s business.”
“Whether owing to that striking optimism or some other loftier force at work,” said family member Gregory Small, she had survived with pancreatic cancer for 12 years, a feat that left her doctors dumbfounded.
The story of the Clinton 12 is not as widely known as the Little Rock Nine or Ruby Bridges, other students who integrated schools after Boyce. She recognized that and set out to change it — spending her later years speaking to students across the U.S.
She co-authored the book, “This Promise of Change,” in 2019 with Debbie Levy and worked with the Green McAdoo Cultural Center, which is located in her childhood elementary school building, to continue the fight for awareness and equality that began when she was 14.
“She used to say that racism is a disease of the heart,” Kamlyn Boyce said. “She moved toward them, not away. Even the people with hate in their heart, she loved. It’s the only way I can put it.”
Boyce is survived by her three children — Kamlyn Young, London Boyce and Victor Boyce — her sister Mamie, three grandchildren and countless people who affectionately call her Nana.
This story originally appeared on LA Times
