The night before Jo Ann Allen walked into Clinton High School for the first time in 1956, she wore her costume with a smile and the excitement of a ninth-grade teenager.
The dress had been sewn by her grandmother – white, with elaborate embellishments, pleats and a wide collar. She and her best friend, Gail Ann Epps Upton, talk about clothes, classes and making new friends.
Ellen, always full of energy, would not have imagined that her daily walks along Foley Hill would soon encounter groups of jeering segregationists and forts of the National Guard. At 14, she was one of the so-called “Clinton 12,” the first black students to desegregate public schools in the South after the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education.
“These kids were doing adult jobs and basically faced firing squads every day,” her daughter-in-law, Libby Boyce, said in an interview. “JoAnn has been so positive and strong through it all. It’s a testament to her and her upbringing.”
Jo Ann Allen died Wednesday of pancreatic cancer at her home in Wilshire Vista, where she was reunited with her family. She is 84 years old.
“She embodied positivity and strength,” said Camryn Young, Allen’s daughter. “She was a people lover. She loved life and always saw the kindness in people in the face of adversity.”
Ellen, 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 the co-author of “The Promise of Change: The Story of One Girl’s Fight for Equality in School,” which she shared with student audiences across the country.
“We have lost such a loving and humble soul. Joan was so generous with her 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 Twelve, said in a statement.
Jo Ann Crozier Ellen Boyce was born on September 15, 1941 in Clinton, a small town in eastern Tennessee. 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 and her sister, Mamie, shared a bedroom that their mother had decorated with red robin wallpaper and a small dresser.
Boyce was keen on learning from an early age and began reading at the age of five when he entered first grade at Green McAdoo School. She credits her parents and her first teacher, Theresa Blair, for nurturing her academic curiosity despite the school’s limited resources.
The Allen family’s life centered around the church. Joan will sing with Mamie at the ceremony and look forward to fish and chips on Friday night.
After graduating from Green McAdoo, she rode a school bus with her classmates to a school in Knoxville – 20 miles from home.
“Those were the days when we would sometimes not be able to go to school because of bad weather or some other unfortunate event,” she wrote in a biography on the McAdoo Center website.
In 1956, Judge Robert Taylor issued an order to consolidate Clinton High School following the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Joann and 11 others will be the first black students to attend.
“When we started school, there were only a few people around. I thought, ‘Well, they’re just here out of curiosity,'” Boyce recalled in a 1956 television interview.
But the next day, segregationists, incited by Ku Klux Klan member John Casper, packed the entrance to Clinton High School.
Boyce said most people at Clinton High School are friendly and curious. But others tortured the 12 children inside – pushing them into the hallway, stomping on their heels, leaving threatening notes and even hammering thumbtacks into Boyce’s chair.
“I started thinking, ‘Maybe they won’t accept us as well as I thought they would,'” Boyce recalled in the interview. “They looked mean. They looked like they just wanted to grab us and throw us out. They didn’t want us at all. I could see the hatred in their hearts.”
The violence in Clinton escalated when Casper was arrested for violating a restraining order meant to prevent him from entering the school. His followers were enraged and laid siege to the town. They pushed over the car of a black driver, attacked a pastor who preached against bigotry, and beat Upton’s boyfriend when he returned to town from a military deployment. Herbert Allen was arrested and later released for defending his home one night from cross-burning by Ku Klux Klan members.
The chaos prompted then-Tennessee Governor Frank Clement to order the National Guard to Clinton to restore peace.
But enough is enough. Alice Allen decides it’s time for her family to leave Tennessee.
“What my mother said, we did,” Boyce told CBS Los Angeles in 2023.
One winter morning in 1957, local reporters interviewed the family before they boarded a car bound for Los Angeles.
“We’re not leaving here with hatred for anybody,” Herbert Allen said. “Even those who are against us … we realize that these people are just misinformed. That’s how they were trained and raised.”
The camera is now focused on Boyce, she says softly. She talked about the A’s and B’s she got that semester, declaring that she “accomplished something.”
She later said that the first five months were the most painful period of her life.
“She felt cheated,” Young told The Times. “She wanted to stay and graduate and prove to everyone that no matter what happened, she could do it. She always believed that love conquers all. That’s what guided her for the rest of her life.”
Clinton High School was mostly reduced to rubble in a 1958 explosion. No one was arrested.
Only two of Clinton’s 12 graduated from the school.
The Allens reunited with relatives already living in California. Boyce attended Dorsey High School in Baldwin Hills and graduated in 1958. She later attended Los Angeles City College and then nursing school.
She became a pediatric nurse and worked in the field for decades.
“She always played the loser role, and she loved kids,” Young said.
Music also attracted her. In Los Angeles, she formed a vocal trio called “The Debs” with her sister Mamie and cousin Sandra, briefly singing backing vocals for Sam Cooke. She later performed jazz throughout the city, from cabaret stages to the historic Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood.
In 1959, she met Victor Boyce at a dance and he “stolen” her from her partner, family members recalled. The couple later married and stayed together for 64 years, raising three children and generations of extended family, including actor Cameron Boyce, who died in 2019.
Many of his fans would call her “Nana,” a title given to her by Boyce’s grandchildren.
Although she suffered from breast cancer, a severe stroke and later pancreatic cancer, her characteristic optimism never faded.
“She would come in and light up the room,” Libby Boyce said. “She shines like no other.”
“Whether it was this amazing optimism or some other higher force at work,” she survived pancreatic cancer for 12 years, a feat that left her doctors stunned, said family member Gregory Small.
The story of the Clinton Twelve is not as well known as that of the Little Rock Nine or Ruby Bridges, students who merged schools after Boyce. She recognized this and set out to change that – speaking to students across the United States later in life
In 2019, she co-authored the book “This Promise of Change” with Debbie Levy and partnered with the Green McAdoo Cultural Center, located in the building of her childhood elementary school, to continue the fight for awareness and equality that began when she was 14.
“She used to say racism was a disease of the soul,” Camryn Boyce said. “She walked toward them, not away. Even those who had hatred in their hearts, she loved. That’s the only way I can express 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 called her Nana.
