NASHVILLE, Tenn.>> Jo Ann Allen Boyce, who as part of the “Clinton 12” helped integrate one of the first public schools in the South, died Wednesday at her Los Angeles home. She was 84.

Her death was confirmed by her daughter, who said her mother died from pancreatic cancer.

Clinton High School in Tennessee was integrated in 1956, a couple of years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown vs. 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.

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 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 opposed 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.

Many children at the school were nice or at least neutral. Boyce was 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.