The night before she attended Clinton High School for the first time in 1956, Jo Ann Allen beamed over her outfit with the excitement of any teenager starting ninth grade.
The dress was sewn by my grandmother – white, with neat trim, pleats and a wide ironed collar. She and her best friend Gail Ann Epps Upton discussed clothes, activities and making new friends.
Always cheerful, Allen had no idea that her daily walk along Foley Hill would soon be greeted by crowds of jeering segregationists and a stronghold of the National Guard. At age 14, she was one of the so-called Clinton 12, the first black students to desegregate a Southern public school after the landmark Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education.
“These kids were doing the work of adults, essentially facing the firing squad every day,” her daughter-in-law, Libby Boyce, said in an interview. “Jo Ann has been so positive and strong through it all. It's a testament to her and her upbringing.”
Surrounded by family at her home in Wilshire Vista, Jo Ann Allen died Wednesday of pancreatic cancer. She was 84.
“She represented positivity and strength,” said Camlyn Young, Allen’s daughter. “She loved people. She loved life and always tried to see the good in people, despite 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 the book This Promise of Change: One Girl's Story in the Fight for School Equality, which she shared with student audiences across the country.
“We have lost such a caring and humble soul. Jo Ann was a person who was so generous with her own story and shared it with people across the country… She was an inspiration to everyone she met,” the Greene McAdoo Cultural Center, a museum preserving the legacy of the 12 Clintons, said in a statement.
Jo Ann Crozier Allen Boyce was born in the small town of Clinton in eastern Tennessee on September 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, which their mother decorated with robin's red wallpaper and a small dressing table.
An avid student from an early age, Boyce was already reading at age 5, when she entered first grade at Green McAdoo School. She credited her parents and her first teacher, Teresa Blair, for nurturing her academic interest despite the school's limited resources.
The Allen family's life revolved around church. Jo Ann sang duets with Mamie at services and looked forward to the Friday night fish fry.
After graduating from Green McAdoo, she rode the school bus with her classmates to school in Knoxville—20 miles from home.
“In those days, there were times when we didn’t make it to school because of inclement weather or some other unfortunate event,” she wrote in a biographical post at the McAdoo Center. website.
In 1956, Judge Robert Taylor ordered the integration of Clinton High School following the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Jo Ann and 11 others will be the first black students to attend.
“When we went to school, there were only a few people around. And I maybe thought, 'Well, they're just here to be curious,'” Boyce recalled in a 1956 television interview.
But the next day, segregationists, driven to madness by Ku Klux Klan member John Kasper, crowded the entrance to Clinton High.
At Clinton High, most people were kind and curious, Boyce said. But others abused the 12 children inside, shoving them down hallways, stepping on their heels, leaving threatening notes and even attaching nails to Boyce's chair.
“I started thinking, ‘Maybe they won’t accept us the way I thought they would,’” Boyce recalled in an interview. “They looked so angry. 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 hatred in their hearts.”
Violence in Clinton increased when Kasper was arrested for violating a restraining order that barred him from attending school. His followers surrounded the small town in rage. They overturned cars with black drivers, attacked a pastor who preached against prejudice, and beat Upton's boyfriend as he returned to town from military service. Herbert Allen was arrested and later released for defending the family home from being burned by a cross by Klansmen one night.
The chaos prompted then-Tennessee Gov. Frank Clement to order Clinton's National Guard to restore peace.
But that was enough. Alice Allen decided it was time for the family to leave Tennessee.
“And we did what my mother said,” Boyce said in interview from CBS Los Angeles in 2023.
On a winter morning in 1957, local reporters interviewed the family before they boarded a car bound for Los Angeles.
“We will not leave here with hatred in our hearts for anyone,” Herbert Allen said. “Even those who are against us… we understand that these people are simply misled. They were taught and raised that way.”
The camera is now on Boise,” she said quietly. She talked about the A's and B's she received this semester, saying she had “accomplished something.”
She later said that the previous five months had been the most painful of her life.
“She felt cheated,” Young told The Times. “She wanted to stay and graduate to show everyone that she could do it no matter what. She always believed that love would conquer all. That's what drove her for the rest of her life.”
Clinton School was almost completely destroyed by an explosion in 1958. No one was arrested.
Only two of the 12 Clintons graduated from high school.
The Allen family joins relatives already living in California. Boyce attended 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 role and loved children,” Young said.
Music also attracted her. In Los Angeles, she formed a vocal trio with her sister Mamie and cousin Sandra called The Debs, singing back-up for Sam Cooke for a time. She later performed jazz sets all over the city, from cabaret stages to the historic Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel.
In 1959, she met Victor Boyce at a dance and he “stole her” from the partner she was dancing with, the family recalls. The couple later married and remained married for 64 years, raising three children and several generations of a large family, including actor Cameron Boyce, who died in 2019.
His many admirers called her “Nana”, a title given to Boyce by her grandchildren.
Even as she suffered breast cancer, a massive stroke, and then pancreatic cancer, her trademark optimism never left her.
“She would come in and just light up the room,” Libby Boyce said. “She shone like no one else.”
“Whether it was because of this amazing optimism or some other greater force,” family member Gregory Small said, she survived pancreatic cancer for 12 years, a feat that left her doctors stunned.
The story of the Clinton 12 is not as widely known as the story of the Little Rock Nine or Ruby Bridges, the other students who integrated schools after Boyce. She realized this and set out to change it, spending her later years interacting with students throughout the United States.
In 2019, she co-authored the book This Promise of Change with Debbie Levy and worked with the Greene McAdoo Cultural Center, which is housed in the elementary school building where she attended, to continue the fight for awareness and equality that began when she was 14 years old.
“She used to say racism was a heart disease,” Camlyn Boyce said. “She walked towards them, not away from them. She loved even people with hatred in her heart. That's the only way I can express it.”
Boyce is survived by her three children, Camlyn Young, London Boyce and Victor Boyce, as well as her sister Mamie, three grandchildren and countless people who affectionately called her Nana.
