Jo Ann Boyce, Clinton 12 member and civil rights trailblazer, dies at 84

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The night before she first walked into Clinton High School in 1956, Jo Ann Allen beamed over her outfit with the excitement of any teenager starting ninth grade.Her grandmother had sewn the dress — white with a careful trim, pleats and a wide-pressed collar.

With her best friend Gail Ann Epps Upton, she buzzed about clothes, classes and making new friends.Always buoyant, Allen would not have guessed that her daily walk down Foley Hill would soon be met with crowds of jeering segregationists and a bulwark of National Guardsmen.At 14, she was one of 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 did an adult job, basically facing a firing squad every day,” her daughter-in-law, Libby Boyce, said in an interview.

“Jo Ann was so positive and strong through it all.It’s a testament to her and her upbringing.”Surrounded by family at her Wilshire Vista home, Jo Ann died Wednesday from pancreatic cancer.

She was 84.“She embodied positivity and strength,” said Kamlyn Young, Allen’s daughter.

“She was a lover of people.She loved life and always sought to see the good in people through 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’ve lost such a caring and humble soul.

Jo Ann was someone who was so generous with her own 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 12, said in a statement.J...