Jo Ann Boyce, Clinton 12 member and civil rights trailblazer, dies

The day before she entered Clinton High School in 1956, Jo Ann Allen beamed over her outfit with the enthusiasm of any teenager starting ninth grade.

Her grandmother had sewn the dress – white with a neat border, pleats and a wide ironed collar. With her best friend Gail Ann Epps Upton, she talked about clothes, classes and making new friends.

Always energetic, Allen would not have guessed that his daily walk down Foley Hill would soon be met with crowds of jeering segregationists and a rampart of National Guardsmen. At age 14, she was among 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 were doing adult work, facing a firing squad every day,” his 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 her family in her Wilshire Vista home, Jo Ann Allen died Wednesday of pancreatic cancer. She was 84 years old.

“She embodied positivity and strength,” said Kamlyn Young, Allen’s daughter. “She loved people. She loved life and always sought 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 “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 humble and caring soul. Jo Ann was someone so generous with her own story and sharing it with people across the country… She inspired everyone she met,” the Green McAdoo Cultural Center, a museum that preserves the legacies of the Clinton 12, 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 of Alice Josephine Hopper Allen and Herbert Allen.

She grew up in a modest house with a large kitchen and two bedrooms. Boyce shared a room with his sister, Mamie, which was decorated by their mother with robin wallpaper and a small dressing table.

Passionate about learning from a young age, Boyce was already reading at age 5 when she entered first grade at Green McAdoo School. She credits 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 the church. Jo Ann sang duets with Mamie during services and looked forward to Friday night fish fries.

After graduating from Green McAdoo, she took the school bus with her classmates to a school in Knoxville, 20 miles from home.

“There were times during those days when we did not make it to school due to bad weather or some other untoward event,” she wrote in a biographical posting 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. Jo Ann and 11 others would become the first black students to attend.

“When we started school, there were just a few people around. And I might have thought, ‘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 — gathered at the entrance to Clinton High.

At Clinton High, most people were kind and curious, Boyce said. But others tormented the 12 children inside — shoving them in the hallways, stepping on their heels, leaving threatening notes and even putting thumbtacks on Boyce’s chair.

“I started thinking, ‘Maybe they’re not going to accept us like I thought they would,’” Boyce recalled in the interview. “They looked so mean. It 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 escalated in Clinton when Kasper was arrested for violating a restraining order meant to keep him from school. His supporters, furious, invaded the small town. They overturned 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 his family home from Klansmen who were set on fire one night.

The chaos prompted then-Tennessee Governor Frank Clement to order the National Guard to Clinton to restore peace.

But it 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 reporters interviewed the family before they piled into a car bound for Los Angeles.

“We are not leaving here with hatred in our hearts against anyone,” Herbert Allen said. “Even those who are against us…we realize that these people are simply misled. They were trained and raised that way.”

Camera now on Boyce, she said softly. She talked about the A’s and B’s she got this semester, saying she “accomplished something.”

The previous five months were the most painful of her life, she later said.

“She felt cheated,” Young told the Times. “She wanted to stay and get her degree to show everyone that she could do it despite everything. She always believed that love conquers all. That’s what guided her throughout her life.”

Clinton High was largely reduced to rubble in a bombing in 1958. No one was arrested.

Only two of the 12 Clintons 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 then attended Los Angeles City College before enrolling in nursing school.

She became a pediatric nurse and worked in that field for decades.

“She always played the underdog and she loved kids,” Young said.

The music pulled her too. In Los Angeles, she formed a vocal trio with her sister Mamie and cousin Sandra called The Debs, briefly singing for Sam Cooke. She later performed jazz sets across the city, cabaret stages at 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 recalled. The couple later married and remained so for 64 years, raising three children and generations of extended family, including actor Cameron Boyce, who died in 2019.

Her many fans called her “Nana,” the title given to Boyce by her grandchildren.

Although she endured breast cancer, a major stroke and later pancreatic cancer, her characteristic optimism never left her.

“She would come in and just light up the room,” Libby Boyce said. “She had a glow that was no one’s business.”

“Whether it was this striking optimism or some other, nobler force at work,” said family member Gregory Small, she survived pancreatic cancer for 12 years, a feat that left her doctors stunned.

The story of the Clinton 12 is not as well known as that of the Little Rock Nine or Ruby Bridges, other students who integrated the schools after Boyce. She recognized it and decided to change it – spending her final years speaking to students across the United States.

She co-wrote the book “This Promise of Change” in 2019 with Debbie Levy and worked with the Green McAdoo Cultural Center, located in her childhood elementary school building, to continue the fight for awareness and equality that began when she was 14.

“She said racism is a disease of the heart,” Kamlyn Boyce said. “She walked towards them, not away. Even the people who had hatred in their hearts, she loved them. That’s the only way I can express it.”

Boyce is survived by his three children – Kamlyn Young, London Boyce and Victor Boyce – his sister Mamie, three grandchildren and countless people who affectionately call him Nana.