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Saul Young, Knoxville News Sentinel
Jo Ann Crozier Allen Boyce, one of the Clinton 12, has died. She was 84 years old.
The East Tennessee civil rights figure died Dec. 3, according to Green McAdoo Cultural Center, a museum dedicated to telling the group’s heroic story.
On Aug. 26, 1956, Boyce and 11 classmates were the first Black students to desegregate Clinton High School in Clinton, Tennessee. Clinton High School was the first public high school integrated in the South after the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision.
Adam Velk, director of the Green McAdoo Cultural Center, described Boyce as kind, generous and forgiving.
“She was one of the kindest people I have ever met,” Velk said. “The fact that she was so willing to share that story and use that story to touch so many lives makes her just an incredible person.”
She and her Black classmates were subjected to hate and bigotry. The tensions led to the summoning of National Guard troops and the bombing of the school in 1958.
Boyce wrote on the Green McAdoo Cultural Center’s website that it was the “most excruciatingly painful event ever to happen.”
Boyce stayed at Clinton High School for just five months. She and her family moved to California in December 1956, according to Knox News archives. There, she met her husband, Victor E. Boyce.
Boyce has three children and several grandchildren, including the late Disney Channel star Cameron Boyce, who died in 2019 at the age of 20.
“We’ve lost such a caring and humble soul,” the Green McAdoo Cultural Center said in a statement. “Jo Ann was someone who was so generous with her own story and shared it with people across the country.”
Boyce was preceded in death by eight of the Clinton 12 members: Maurice Soles, Anna Theresser Caswell, Alfred Williams, William R. Latham, Ronald Gordon “Poochie” Hayden, Robert Thacker, Bobby Cain and Alvah McSwain.
Three members are still living: Regina Turner Smith, Minnie Ann Dickey Jones and Gail Ann Epps Upton
