“He had to explain to me that the signs above the water fountain didn’t describe the water but the people who could use the fountain,” said Allen, a 40-year resident of Beaufort who is now retired from Coastal Empire Mental Health Center. “I still didn’t quite understand. I asked him, ‘Why do I have to use the ‘colored’ water fountain? I thought we were Negroes.’ Then he explained to me we’ve been called many things through the years.”

Lawful segregation was in its throes when Allen was a girl growing up in and around college campuses in Florida, Georgia and Tennessee. Her parents were both college graduates and afforded her a lifestyle mostly cloistered from the worst of the racial ugliness that segregation’s its end. But the lesson she learned at those Nashville water fountains stuck with Allen.

In 2018, years after earning undergraduate and graduate degrees in history, she developed a lecture on Jim Crow laws. Allen presented it for the first time as part of a lecture series sponsored by the Beaufort County Library and the Beaufort History Museum, of which she is a board member. When she finished her talk, Allen received a standing ovation.

“I was stunned and gratified,” Allen said. “The lectures have been well-received, but that’s the first time I remembered anyone getting a standing ovation.”

Allen has delivered two other lectures as part of the series, including one on Harriet Tubman. In retirement, she has developed a knack for explaining society’s ills; in her professional career, her focus was curing them.

A licensed social worker — she has a master’s in social work to complement her two history degrees — Allen worked with adolescents and their families at Coastal Empire Community Mental Health Center from 1978 until her retirement at the end of 2015. Beginning in 2006, Andrea served as the center’s assistant director, developing programs for children, adolescents and adults throughout a five-county area.

Allen has also served on the boards of a variety of nonprofit and for-profit organizations, including Beaufort County BB&T and Citizens Against Violence Everywhere. She has been on the board of the Collaborative Organization of Services for Youth since its founding in 1993. She also has served on the board of Beaufort Memorial Hospital for 10 years and intends to continue in that capacity for another two years.

Allen is a 1990 graduate of Leadership Beaufort and a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Nu Delta Omega Chapter. She has served as Sunday school superintendent for Tabernacle Baptist Church in Beaufort since 1996. Allen has put down deep roots in Beaufort, but she arrived in 1978 thinking she’d stay only a year or two, then move to wherever her parents retired — most likely, Winston-Salem, N.C., or Tallahassee, Fla.

But then she met Ed Allen — at the time, the director of county emergency medical services and now Beaufort County’s coroner. They married in 1983. Thoughts of leaving dissipated and her parents eventually moved to Beaufort. “This is home for Ed,” Allen says with a smile. And after 40-plus years of public service, it’s her home, too.