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KOLUMN Magazine
The Girl on Foley Hill
How Jo Ann Allen Boyce walked out of a pink-tiled bathroom, down a Tennessee hill, and into the fight to desegregate public schools.
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The night before Jo Ann Allen walked into Clinton High School, the house on Jarnigan Road hummed with ordinary excitement.
Her grandmother had been at the sewing machine for weeks, turning bolts of fabric into a ninth-grader’s dream: pressed skirts, blouses with careful collars, a dress that felt grown-up but still girlish. Accounts differ on the exact color of what she chose that Sunday night—black and patterned in one telling, white with a wide collar in another—but everyone agrees on what mattered: the clothes were stitched by family, by love, by a woman who believed that how you walked into a room could fortify you against what waited there.
Fourteen-year-old Jo Ann studied herself in the mirror, fussed with her bangs, talked on the phone with her best friend, Gail Epps, about new teachers and who might be in their homeroom. It was a scene that could have played out in any American town at the end of summer 1956.
Except that their first day of school would help set the course for the modern civil rights movement, and the walk down the hill the next morning would carry them through a gauntlet of people who believed children like them did not belong in a white public school at all.
Jo Ann Crozier Allen—who later became Jo Ann Boyce—would always insist that she was, at heart, “just a girl who wanted to go to school.” But by the time her family left Tennessee five months later, after riots, cross burnings and a bombing that reduced Clinton High School to rubble, the girl from Jarnigan Road had become something else as well: a symbol, a witness, and, eventually, a storyteller determined to make sure the quiet details of that life—the wallpaper with red robins, the cold outhouse walks, the church duets with her sister—were not lost inside the headlines.
A house on Jarnigan Road
Jo Ann was born in Clinton, a small town in eastern Tennessee, on September 15, 1941, the eldest of three children of Alice Josephine Hopper Allen and Herbert Allen. Her mother came from nearby Oliver Springs, where Jo Ann’s grandfather farmed and worked timber. Her father had left Luverne, Alabama, a Jim Crow town with its own history of racial terror, in search of steadier work. Clinton’s factories and shops offered a modest foothold.
By the time Jo Ann could remember anything clearly, the family was settled in a small two-bedroom house with a big kitchen on Jarnigan Road. Indoor plumbing hadn’t reached them yet. The toilet was outside, down a short path she and her sister dreaded on winter nights. What she remembers even more vividly is the big tub in the warmth of the kitchen, the steam rising as her mother heated water on the stove. When the town sewer system finally came through and the Allens put in an indoor bathroom, her mother chose pink fixtures. The room struck Jo Ann as impossibly glamorous—“Oh, so pretty,” she later wrote.
She shared a bedroom with her younger sister, Mamie. Their mother decorated it with red-robin wallpaper and a little dressing table skirted in ruffles. “We thought it was the prettiest room ever,” Jo Ann recalled in a memoir for the Green McAdoo Cultural Center, the museum that now tells the Clinton 12 story.
Her father worked long hours, sometimes for a local physician, sometimes at other jobs as they came. He was, by every account, gentle until he needed not to be—a man who believed in church and education, but who would later stand in the yard, rifle in hand, between his family and a crowd of men who came to burn a cross outside his home.
Inside that house, Jo Ann was spoiled first and then dethroned. As the only grandchild on both sides until age three, she basked in a web of aunts and uncles. When Mamie arrived, the family “sent her away for a little while to cool down,” she would joke. The girls grew into a classic big-sister, little-sister tangle: Jo Ann protective and bossy, Mamie quick to tattle—especially about boys. Later, a baby brother, Herbert Jr., arrived when Jo Ann was 12. Their mother had a difficult pregnancy and surgery afterward, and Jo Ann took on what she called the “other mother” role, changing diapers, warming bottles, learning the rhythms of night feedings.
Beyond home, life revolved around two churches—Mt. Sinai Baptist and Asbury Methodist—and the close-knit Black community that clustered around Green McAdoo Elementary School. There were school plays and talent shows where, as she remembered it, “the community came out in full force to encourage, cajole, egg on, their children.” There were Friday fish fries, Sunday choirs, and the sense, not uncommon in segregated towns, that Black Clinton functioned as a town within a town, with its own institutions and expectations.
Green McAdoo, and an education marked “obsolete”
Jo Ann arrived at school already knowing how to read. Her parents had taught her before she was five, and when she showed up at Green McAdoo, the “colored” elementary school on the hill above Clinton High, the teachers placed her in first grade immediately. Her first teacher, Teresa Blair, ran a one-room classroom that held grades one through four; the principal handled grades five through eight next door.
Resources were scant. The building had just two classrooms. The textbooks, passed down from the white elementary school, arrived with frayed covers and rubber-stamped labels that read “obsolete.” Still, the teachers were, in Jo Ann’s telling, relentless. They drilled penmanship and grammar, insisted that their students understand science and math, and made up with energy what the school lacked in supplies. Reading, writing, English, and science became Jo Ann’s favorite subjects; math remained her sticking point, especially once algebra and geometry appeared.
Clinton’s segregation regime was typical and total. Jo Ann could not swim in the public pool or lace up skates at the rink. She and other Black residents drank from separate fountains, sat in the backs of buses, avoided downtown counters and restaurants. Yet Clinton, in her memory, did not feel like some of the more brutally policed Southern towns. She did not remember being forced off sidewalks to let white pedestrians pass. Violence existed more as threat than as daily spectacle—until the fall of 1956.
For Black children who wanted to attend high school, the limits were more logistical than anything else. Green McAdoo ended at eighth grade. After that, parents who could scrape together the money paid for their children to ride a bus roughly twenty miles to Knoxville, first to Vine Junior High and then to Austin High School, both all-Black schools.
After finishing eighth grade, Jo Ann joined them. She rose before dawn, dressed, and walked to the bus stop. The ride took about an hour each way. The bus was hot in late summer, freezing in midwinter, and its schedule made extracurricular life almost impossible. By the time she returned home in the evenings, there was no time for clubs, sports, or lingering with friends. She later admitted she never fully shook the feeling of being “a country girl in a city school,” unsure of herself in Knoxville’s larger, faster-paced environment.
If the bus ride weighed on Jo Ann, it crushed larger families. One Anderson County couple, the McSwains, had twelve children, triplets among them. They were already paying to send two older children to Austin High. Facing the prospect of funding rides for nearly a dozen, they sued the Anderson County Board of Education, arguing that the county should at least provide a comparable high school in Clinton for Black students or end the busing regime entirely. Other Black families joined.
Their case—McSwain et al. v. County Board of Education—prefigured the larger fight underway in the federal courts. In 1954, the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education, declaring that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. Two years later, after lower-court reversals and protracted delay, a federal judge ordered Clinton High School to admit Black students for the 1956–57 school year.
Preparing to walk down the hill
Jo Ann learned that she would be among the twelve almost matter-of-factly. The group had taken placement tests; each student, she recalled, was slotted into the appropriate grade and track. They were not handpicked as activists. They simply lived in the Clinton High attendance zone and wanted, in varying degrees, to attend the school that rose so visibly in their own town.
That summer, the twelve Black students prepared quietly, as best they could. They had read about integration battles elsewhere—the mobs, the spit, the jeers. But Clinton, in their minds, was different. “Nothing bad had ever happened to us here,” Jo Ann told journalist Adam Harris decades later. She expected some discomfort, perhaps some name-calling, but also that white citizens would follow the law.
School officials, flush with the knowledge that Clinton High would be the first state-run high school in Tennessee to desegregate, assembled white students in the auditorium near the end of the 1955–56 term. They talked through what was coming and how the students were expected to behave. It was, as Harris put it, a crash course in civility, if not acceptance.
On the morning of August 27, 1956, Jo Ann dressed in her grandmother’s sewn outfit and walked to Green McAdoo. There, on the small campus where she had once used those “obsolete” readers, she joined nine of the other twelve. They formed a circle with relatives and their pastor and prayed. The prayer, she said, “steeled” them.
Then they stepped out the door and began the walk down Foley Hill toward Broad Street and Clinton High.
At first, the scene was almost underwhelming. A few white students clustered along the route, craning their necks to gawk. Three small boys held hand-lettered signs: we won’t go to school with negroes. Inside the school, teachers were briskly professional. That first day, each Black student was placed alone in classrooms full of white peers. Jo Ann felt every set of eyes on her—“all eyes were definitely on me,” she remembered—but some classmates nodded, others murmured greetings, and the day passed without open violence.
The next sign that something more complicated was happening came from inside the social life of the school. In her homeroom, Jo Ann ran for class office and was elected vice president. For a Black girl who had been riding a Jim Crow bus just the year before, the moment felt surreal—proof, she thought, that if people simply got to know one another, the lines on the map might blur. A white classmate later told The New York Times that she had won because she was “pretty and smart” and carried herself with warmth.
For a few days, that version of Clinton seemed possible.
“Very anxious because we didn’t know”
Outside the school, however, another story was gestating.
White supremacist organizer John Kasper, a Ku Klux Klan member associated with the White Citizens’ Councils, arrived in Clinton determined to turn the town into a symbol of resistance. He went door to door, telephoned parents, gave speeches on courthouse lawns warning that integrated schools would lead to interracial marriage. Night after night, the crowds swelled.
The mood shifted almost immediately.
“Very anxious because we didn’t know how we were going to be received,” Jo Ann recalled years later of those early days.
By the second day of school, her anxiety had an object. When the twelve turned onto Broad Street, more people lined the route—no longer just curious students but adults carrying homemade placards and shouting slurs. Some tossed rocks and rotten food. Others spat in the direction of the children as they walked. It felt, Jo Ann would say, “like you were being squeezed… smothered by these rows of people on the side of the road.”
The harassment followed them into the building. Students stepped on the backs of their heels as they walked the hallways, hard enough to bloody shoes by week’s end. Someone put tacks on Jo Ann’s chair. More than once she opened her locker to find torn books and notes telling her to go back to Austin High. A sign appeared on a set of lockers: go home.
In interviews recorded at the time and revisited six decades later in the documentary The Clinton 12, Jo Ann described a split reality: teachers who tried to keep order, white classmates who were kind but scared to show it, and others who exuded what she could only describe as hate. Some students scribbled epithets on notebook paper and dropped them on the desks of Black classmates. Others moved their desks away when Jo Ann sat down.
Kasper’s agitation helped transform what might have remained a tense local experiment into a national flashpoint. On one early September night, several thousand segregationists gathered downtown. A volunteer “citizens’ police force” deployed tear gas to break up a crowd that had begun attacking cars driven by Black residents. Local law enforcement begged the governor for help. Within days, Tennessee’s National Guard had taken up positions around Clinton High—soldiers with rifles and bayonets forming a corridor for the twelve children to walk through.
Inside that cordon, Jo Ann still had to navigate Latin homework, geometry problems, pop quizzes. She still sang in church and argued with her sister about boys. But by fall’s midpoint, the strain had begun to seep into every corner of her life.
A town in turmoil
The violence flickered, receded, and then came back worse.
In early December, the Rev. Paul Turner, a white Baptist pastor who supported integration, decided to walk with the twelve students to school, a simple gesture of solidarity in front of the cameras. Later that day, white men beat him bloody in the street.
Crosses burned on Black families’ lawns. One night, men gathered outside the Allens’ house on Jarnigan Road. Herbert Allen, who had once left Alabama to carve out a safer life for his family, now armed himself and stood watch to make sure the threats did not become something worse. He was arrested in the chaos and eventually released, but the message was unmistakable: the battle over Clinton High had invaded their living room.
For all the horror, there were glints of kindness. A white teacher, remembered by Jo Ann only as Mrs. Anderson, made a point of checking on her in class, offering small courtesies that felt, in that atmosphere, radical. Some white students smiled or whispered encouragement in stairwells, then shrank back, too afraid of their peers to stand near the Clinton 12 when mobs formed outside.
But goodwill could not compete with the daily grind of intimidation. Jo Ann’s grades held steady—mostly A’s and a B that first semester—but it grew harder to concentrate. The walk to school felt longer each day. The city, which had once seemed like a safe small town where “nothing bad ever happened,” now echoed with rumors and threats.
In January 1957, as winter settled in, Alice Allen made a decision. The family would leave.
“And what my mother said, we did,” Jo Ann told a CBS interviewer decades later, still sounding a little like the teenager who hadn’t wanted to argue.
“We’re not leaving with hatred in our hearts”
On a cold morning early that year, the Allens packed their car for California. Local reporters, tipped off to the symbolism of the departure, arrived with notebooks and cameras. The family stood beside their modest home and tried to explain themselves.
Herbert Allen, measured even then, told a television crew that they were not leaving with hatred for anyone, “even those who were against us”—a line his daughter would repeat for the rest of her life. The people who had hurled rocks and threats, he said, were “misled,” raised in a system that taught them to fear Black neighbors.
Jo Ann was asked what the months at Clinton High had meant. She spoke softly about the grades she had earned, about feeling that she had “accomplished something.” But when she reflected later, especially with her own children and grandchildren, she admitted she also felt cheated. She had wanted to walk across the stage in Clinton, to stare down the town’s doubters with a diploma in hand.
A year after she left, in 1958, a bomb ripped through Clinton High School, reducing much of the building to rubble. No one was killed, and no one was ever convicted. Only two members of the original Clinton 12—Bobby Cain and Gail Epps—would eventually graduate from the school, becoming the first Black male and female to receive diplomas from an integrated, state-run high school in Tennessee.
The Allens, meanwhile, resettled in Los Angeles, joining relatives already there. Jo Ann finished high school at Dorsey in Baldwin Hills, trained as a nurse, raised children, and, in time, grandchildren. For a while, she spoke only sparingly about Clinton. But as the civil rights movement became history, and then curriculum, she returned to that hill and that walk in her writing and public talks, determined that children would learn that before the more famous Little Rock Nine, twelve teenagers in a small Tennessee town had climbed down a hill into history.
Her 2019 memoir in verse, This Promise of Change, written with author Debbie Levy, braided her memories with newspaper clippings, court documents, and archival film stills. It has since become a classroom staple, inviting middle-school readers to inhabit the mind of a girl trying to navigate Latin declensions and hate-filled chants at the same time.
Even late in life, sitting in TV studios wearing a shirt printed with the face of her grandson, the actor Cameron Boyce, she returned to the same refrain. She wanted young people to know about “sticking to your guns,” about walking the path you have to walk, even when it is lined with people yelling that you do not belong.
The story she told was never just about mobs and soldiers. It was about a pink bathroom and a robin-papered bedroom; about a first teacher who squeezed eight grades into two rooms and still found ways to make children love books; about Friday fish fries and Sunday duets; about a grandmother bent over a sewing machine, stitching courage into seams.
If Brown v. Board was the law, Jo Ann Allen Boyce’s life as a student—first on Jarnigan Road, then at Green McAdoo, then down that hill to Clinton High—is one of the stories that turned that law into something lived.