NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Jo Ann Allen Boyce, who as part of the “Clinton 12” helped integrate one of the first public schools in the South, died on Wednesday at her Los Angeles home. She was 84.
Her death was confirmed by her daughter, Kamlyn Young, who said her mother died from pancreatic cancer after living with it for a decade.
Clinton High School in Tennessee was integrated in 1956, a couple of years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v Board of Education that separating public school children on the basis of race was unconstitutional and a year before Little Rock Central High School was desegregated by force. Unlike the Little Rock Nine, the Clinton 12 students were not picked by community leaders for the job of desegregation. They just happened to live within the Anderson County school district at the time.
As a 14-year-old sophomore, Boyce was excited about the opportunity to attend the formerly all-white high school. She previously had to walk past it to catch a bus that took her and other Black teenagers to a segregated high school in Knoxville, about 20 miles (32 kilometers) away.
“She was thinking about, ‘What clothes was I going to wear? How would I do my hair? Who were going to be my friends?’” daughter-in-law Libby Boyce said in a telephone interview on Thursday.
Although the court-ordered desegregation in Clinton was accepted by state and local authorities, many in the local white community were against it. They were soon joined by Ku Klux Klan members and segregationists from outside the community in a series of violent protests that led to the National Guard being called in to restore order.
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In a television interview at the time, Boyce recounted that their first day of school, a Monday, was fairly calm, with a few onlookers who she thought might just be curious. The next day, there were more people gathered to watch the group of Black children walk to school, including a boy with a protest sign.
“On Wednesday morning, I almost cried to go back home because there were so many people, and they looked so mean,” she said. “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.”
Many of children inside the school were nice or at least neutral. Boyce was even elected vice president of her home room. But there were also children who left signs on the lockers of the Black students, called them names and threw things at them. “It just made me feel bad, and I couldn’t concentrate at all on my lessons,” she said.
After high school, Boyce went on to have a short career in a female singing group and a long career as a pediatric nurse. Outside of work, she often spoke at schools about her experience integrating Clinton.
“She wanted to make sure that young people knew about it,” Libby Boyce said. “And her important message was not to hate, to bring love instead.” In 2019, she co-wrote an autobiographical children’s book called “This Promise of Change.”
Although Boyce’s family had originally been optimistic about integration, with her grandmother making her several new outfits, the violence became too much for them, said Adam Velk, executive director of the Green McAdoo Cultural Center, which promotes the legacy of the Clinton 12. In December of 1956, they left Clinton for Los Angeles. Only two members of the original Clinton 12 ended up staying to graduate from the school.
In spite of everything, Boyce later told interviewers that she did not want to leave Clinton. Her home and her friends were there, and she also believed that what she was doing was important.
“She wanted to be in the fight,” Young said. “She was an incredibly strong person. She didn’t want to back down. She wanted to contribute.”
Optimism was her “secret power,” Young added. “Even in adversity, she would choose to find the positive.”
Boyce told Velk that in the years after she left Clinton, “folks who were very mean to her, who were abusive to her in high school, a number of them had reached out to offer apologies. And she told me she always tried to find forgiveness in her heart for them.”
In a short autobiography for the Center, she wrote about her childhood in Clinton, where she attended a Black primary school and participated in “plays and pageants, assemblies and talent shows.” She was also very engaged in her church, where her father directed the choir and her mother played piano. She and her sister sang duets for church services. Later in California, they briefly formed a musical group with their cousin that put out a couple of singles.
Boyce is survived by sister Mamie Hubbard, three children and three grandchildren. Her grandson, Cameron Boyce, was a well known actor who died suddenly in 2019 at the age of 20 from an epileptic seizure.
