Jo Ann Allen Boyce Dies at 84; Braved Mobs in Integrating a School

She was one of the Clinton 12, Black students who broke a race barrier by entering a Tennessee high school in 1956 in the face of harassment by white segregationists.

Jo Ann Allen Boyce, one of the first Black students to desegregate a public high school in the South as part of the Clinton 12, died on Dec. 3 at her home in Los Angeles. She was 84.

Her death, from pancreatic cancer, was confirmed by Adam Velk, the director of the Green McAdoo Cultural Center in Clinton, Tenn., a museum that commemorates the students’ stand.

Ms. Boyce was a 14-year-old in Clinton, a small eastern-Tennessee city near Knoxville, when she and the others were thrust into the early stages of a struggle that was to rip apart the South for the next 15 years.

In August 1956, she was among the first to endure what hundreds of Black students would undergo, all over the region, in the following years: taunts, threats, harassment and angry mobs determined to block integration.

A year before the integration crisis in Little Rock, Ark., which is far better remembered, the events in Clinton, unfolding under the eyes of the national news media, were an ominous foretaste of what was to come.

“Wednesday morning I almost cried to go back home because there were so many people,” Ms. Boyce, then Jo Ann Allen, told a CBS News interviewer later in 1956, describing the cursing mob outside Clinton High School on her third day there as a sophomore.

“They looked like they just wanted to grab us and throw us out,” she continued. “They didn’t want us at all, and I could see the hate in their hearts.”

Worse followed inside. Some students “put signs all up and told us to get out, and they threw paper at us,” Jo Ann recalled in the interview on Edward R. Murrow’s “See It Now” program. “They shoved us in the halls. They threw chalk at us and said all sorts of nasty things.”

With the mob outside becoming increasingly abusive in the days that followed, Gov. Frank G. Clement of Tennessee, a Democrat, sent in 600 National Guardsmen in armored personnel carriers and seven tanks along with 100 highway patrolmen to quell the unrest.

Mr. Clement, like the principal of Clinton High, David Brittain Jr., was opposed to integration. But he was also determined to follow the United States Supreme Court’s ruling two years earlier, in Brown v. Board of Education, outlawing segregation in the public schools.

The unrest didn’t stop with the arrival of the National Guard. The courthouse square in Clinton, population 4,000, was filled with residents “muttering denunciations of Negroes, school integration, local officials and visiting newspaper men,” The New York Times’s Southern correspondent, John N. Popham, wrote in a front-page dispatch.

By the end of the year, with the atmosphere in the city steadily deteriorating — “each day heightened the tension, each day the students had to run through crueler gantlets of insults, and each day fewer students dared to show up,” George Barrett wrote at the time in The New York Times Magazine — Jo Ann’s family had had enough.

They pulled her out of Clinton High and moved to Los Angeles at the urging of an uncle of hers who lived there. After finishing school, she began a long career as a pediatric nurse in California.

Only two of the 12 students graduated from Clinton High School. The others left, some to enroll elsewhere; one joined the Army, and one was expelled. The school was destroyed by a bomb, most likely planted by the Ku Klux Klan, in 1958. It was rebuilt and reopened in 1960.

Jo Ann’s hometown had at first seemed like a promising candidate to begin undoing segregation. Black parents there, joined by the N.A.A.C.P., had filed suit against the local school board in 1950, four years before the Brown decision. They were tired of having to send their children to high school in Knoxville, 20 miles away.

In January 1956, a federal district judge in Knoxville, Robert Taylor, ruled that Anderson County — Clinton is the county seat — would have to comply with the Brown decision. Clinton High would be the first of its schools to integrate.

On her first day there, Jo Ann was elected vice-president of her home room, Mr. Barrett reported in The Times Magazine. But outside, trouble was brewing: A man named John Kasper, a member of the White Citizens’ Councils, a network of white supremacist groups, had arrived in town from New Jersey determined to make Clinton High a segregation battleground.

He began telephoning residents from a pay phone and knocking on doors, urging white people to resist school integration. It was a pattern that would be repeated throughout the crisis over integration in the South: articulate ideologues of racism arriving to play on the hates and prejudices of the white residents of small towns.

“Kasper was a rabble-rouser,” Louis Menand wrote in an article about the Clinton episode in The New Yorker. “He was arrested many times in his career as an agitator.”

Mr. Kasper, a bookstore owner, was a disciple of, and a correspondent with, the poet Ezra Pound, whose racism and antisemitism he shared. A federal jury eventually convicted Mr. Kasper and others of interfering with the desegregation of Clinton High. But not before Jo Ann and her family had left town for good.

Jo Ann Crozier Allen was born in Clinton on Sept. 15, 1941, the eldest of three children of Herbert and Alice Hooper Allen. Her father “did a lot of side jobs,” working on cars and houses, said Mr. Velk, of the McAdoo cultural center. Her mother worked as a domestic for one of the city’s wealthier white families.

Jo Ann attended Green McAdoo Elementary School in Clinton and Vine Junior High and Austin High School in Knoxville, all segregated schools, before enrolling at Clinton High.

She and the others who broke the race barrier there were not “hand-chosen; we were just the 12 that were ready to move on” with their education, she recalled in a Disney Channel video narrated by her grandson the actor Cameron Boyce, who died at 20 in 2019. In a brief autobiography on the McAdoo center website, Ms. Boyce wrote of the “hate we, as a group, faced daily when walking to school, while climbing the stairs to enter and, on a too frequent basis, in the school’s hallways.”

After moving to Los Angeles, she graduated from Dorsey High School in 1958 and from nursing school at Los Angeles City College in 1963. She had a brief singing career in a group called the Debs and shared a manager with the singer Sam Cooke.

In later years, Ms. Boyce spoke often at schools and in interviews about her experience, and wrote a children’s book about it, “This Promise of Change: One Girl’s Story in the Fight for School Equality” (2019, with Debbie Levy).

Her husband, Victor Boyce, died in 2023. Ms. Boyce is survived by her daughter, Kamlyn Young; her sons, London and Victor Boyce; a sister, Mamie Hubbard; and three grandchildren.

Recalling the turmoil at Clinton High, Ms. Boyce said in her grandson’s video: “There were days when we were really fearful. We just continued to walk.”

But, she added, “it was our school as well as the kids who were white.”

Related Content