History Spotlight: Sand Unshaken, The Origin Story of Alma Thomas

SOURCE: "Sand Unshaken: The Origin Story of Alma Thomas" by Rebecca Bush featured in Alma W. Thomas, Everything is Beautiful by Seth Feman and Jonathan Frederick Walz, 2021.

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Alma Woodsey Thomas left the Chattahoochee Valley with her family at the age of fifteen and spent the rest of her life rejecting anyone's suggestion that she might ever want to live there again. An oft-repeated anecdote told by Thomas and her sister John Maurice claims that when their family crossed the Potomac River into the District of Columbia, their mother instructed her daughters to "take off your shoes and shake all that Georgia sand out of them and don't look back."

Nevertheless, Thomas' family history and childhood in Georgia greatly influenced her life and work. Her parents' backgrounds helped them become leaders of a nascent African American merchant class and provided their children with experiences not readily available to most of the Black residents of Columbus. Her mother's aptitude for dressmaking is reflected in the hand-sewn dresses Alma wore and her belief that beauty could be found in every creative endeavor. Perhaps most strikingly, Thomas' canvases reflect the influences of her upbringing, both in a suburban neighborhood with abundant fresh air and green space, and on her grandfather's farm in Alabama.

Alma W. Thomas

Alma was born on September 22, 1891, in the Rose Hill neighborhood. She was born into a family that valued education, creativity, and self-determination. Her early life unfolded in a household where books, learning, music, and beauty were all taken seriously.

Her mother’s family, the Canteys, had a particularly strong influence on the world into which she was born. Alma’s maternal grandfather, Winter Cantey, had been born into slavery in South Carolina in the 1830s. It seems to have been widely known that Cantey was the biological son of his enslaver, John Cantey, and the half-brother of John's son James, born in 1818. In the early 1850s, he married Fannie Simmons, a South Carolinian with African, Indigenous, and European heritage. After John Cantey's death in 1856, Winter and Fannie moved to James Cantey's plantation in Russell County, Alabama, where they lived for most of their lives.

In Alabama, the Canteys raised ten children who survived to adulthood. Winter Cantey made a successful living as an independent farmer without the exploitative practices of the sharecropping system that soon developed. By 1870, he had acquired hundreds of acres and achieved a degree of economic independence that was exceptional for a formerly enslaved man in the postwar South. He also built a two-room schoolhouse on his property so that his children and others in the rural Fort Mitchell area could be educated. That act alone says much about the family values Alma inherited. Education was not simply admired; it was built into the family’s vision of progress and survival.

Fannie and Winter Cantey at their Fort Mitchell home, c. 1910.

Alabama Department of Archives and History.

That devotion carried forward into the next generation. Alma’s mother, Amelia Whitaker Cantey, completed public school in Columbus, and many members of her extended family went on to attend Tuskegee Institute. Teaching became a respected path among the Canteys, and the family participated in literary and cultural life that emphasized study, discipline, and uplift. Alma grew up in an environment where intellectual ambition and cultural seriousness were expected.

Alma’s father, John Harris Thomas, also helped shape the world of her childhood. Although his earlier life is less fully documented, records show him as a young man working as a porter in Columbus. Over time, he rose economically and achieved notable success. By the early 1890s, he had become one of only two African American saloon owners in Columbus, and for a period he appears to have been the city’s only Black bar owner. That success made possible one of the most striking features of Alma Thomas’s early life: her parents owned a Queen Anne-style home in Rose Hill.

Amelia and John Thomas, c. 1888.

Alma Thomas Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Careful examination of land deeds reveals how a Black couple was able to move into a brand-new home in a White neighborhood in 1890, just as racial violence and discrimination ramped up in the South. In May 1889, a White woman named Sallie May Markham purchased a lot in Rose Hill for $475. Sallie's husband was T. Woodsey (or Woodson) Markham, a man identified by Alma and John Maurice Thomas as their father's half-brother. (Alma's middle name was Woodsey.) According to the family, John Thomas and Markham built the home together, though neither claimed proficiency as a carpenter. (Columbus city directories identify Markham as a traveling salesman and a clerk in a general store.)

Regardless of who built the home, John Thomas purchased Sallie Markham's lot a mere five months later, paying only eighty-five dollars more for property that now included a house. Even more tellingly, the sale took place in Spalding County, where Sallie Markham had grown up, but nearly 80 miles from Muscogee County, where the house was located. By conducting the legal transaction in a distant county, the two may have hoped to avoid scrutiny of a White woman selling a home in a White neighborhood to a Black man. By 1890, John and Amelia Thomas had become the first known African American couple to own a home in Rose Hill. They lived at 419 21st Street (now 411 21st Street) on a small rise of land between large antebellum homes at the top of the hill and lean-tos at the bottom. The Thomas family remained the only nonwhite family in the neighborhood for the next sixteen years, until they left Columbus.

The house itself became part of Alma Thomas’s emotional and artistic memory. In later years, she wrote about Rose Hill with affection, recalling roses blooming nearly year-round and describing the area as full of beauty. She remembered two circular flower beds near the home so vividly that she believed their forms remained in her subconscious and later resurfaced in her paintings. That recollection is especially striking in retrospect. Long before Alma Thomas became known for abstract canvases alive with rhythm and color, she was already taking in visual patterns from the world around her.

Alma's memories of childhood suggest that her sensitivity to color and movement began very early. She later recalled the creek near the family home, where changing colors in the clay caught her imagination. She would collect the colored clay in cans and take it home for experiments. In another memory associated with her later painting Babbling Brook and Whistling Poplar Trees Symphony (below), she described wading in the brook, listening to the rain, lying in the grass, and watching yellow leaves in the poplar trees.

These are not incidental childhood details. They reveal a young girl already attentive to the visual and sensory drama of the natural world — to color, pattern, sound, texture, and change. The artist who would later create radiant abstract compositions did not develop in isolation from experience. She developed through observation. The world around her taught her to notice. Columbus, in that sense, became part of her earliest artistic education.

Her family’s summers at her grandfather Winter Cantey’s property in Alabama added another layer to that education. Thomas later painted Grandfather’s House (below), a work that reflects her enduring attachment to that landscape and to the family gatherings associated with it. Even after moving north, she and her sister returned to visit the property. These memories show that the Southern world Thomas left behind was not defined only by oppression. It also held family, affection, beauty, and belonging.

By 1891, John Thomas had achieved nearly unprecedented business success by becoming one of only two African American saloon owners in Columbus. His eponymous bar was located at 1037 First Avenue, just one block from bustling Broad Street. Thomas maintained his status as a sole proprietor for at least another five years, and by 1896 he was the only Black bar owner in the city. By this time, Amelia's unmarried sister Elizabeth had moved into the home. Even with the addition of Elizabeth's income, the birth of three more daughters may have placed a strain on the household's finances.

By 1898, city directories suggest that Thomas may have sold the bar to Joseph G. Weeks, an African American blacksmith who employed Thomas at the establishment now known as J. G. Weeks & Co. However, by the turn of the century, the business was owned by a White man. Increasingly restrictive Jim Crow laws likely eliminated the ability for Weeks and Thomas to successfully obtain a business license and sustain their livelihood.

The loss of their business may have prompted John and Amelia Thomas to consider leaving the Deep South, but racial violence that increasingly permeated the area soon made a move more pressing. Amelia Thomas believed that Alma's congenital hearing impediment was due to a fright caused during her pregnancy, when a "lynch party" climbed the hill near their home "with ropes and dogs, looking for someone." Whether the men were looking for a specific man is unclear, but when they saw John Thomas, "the most respected Negro in Columbus," they passed by without incident. (Perhaps proving the truth of Thomas's favored status, the funerals of his presumed father, Timothy Markham, and his other half-brother, Charles H. Markham, included pallbearers from the ranks of Columbus' elite.)

Amelia's sister Sallie Cantey McDuffie, then living in Washington, D.C., presented the nation's capital as a safer alternative with more educational opportunities for the Thomas girls and helped the family with the purchase of a row house, itself unusual for African Americans in the District at that time. Not long after selling their Columbus home in July 1907, Amelia Thomas left for Washington with daughters Alma, Kathryn, and John Maurice. John Thomas joined the family by early 1908.

7-year-old Fannie Thomas (right) is seen sitting with 5-year-old John Maurice (left) in this 1903 photograph, which served as inspiration for Alma Thomas's Bust of a Young Girl, 1923.

The Collection of The Columbus Museum.

Against the backdrop of Jim Crow, it is also worth remembering that the Thomas family had lost their second-youngest daughter, ten-year-old Fannie, named for Amelia's mother, to diphtheria in 1906. Grief, especially the loss of a child, has led many people to seek a fresh start, and this untimely death may have been one more factor that encouraged the family to leave Columbus behind.

Though Alma never gained fame as a sculptor, she did complete a bust while studying at Howard University (her first, according to a notation on a photograph in The Columbus Museum's collection) modeled on Fannie. Alma and John Maurice Thomas both spoke frequently of Alma's early experimentation with clay while the family lived in Columbus, and perhaps the medium emotionally resonated with the thirty-two-year-old artist as she created the work. Though Thomas family records and John Maurice's own recollections contain very little about their deceased sister, her face and spirit clearly remained present in the family's minds. Indeed, Alma kept the ceramic bust in her bedroom, where it occupied a prominent place until her death.

Alma was also deeply influenced by the culture of learning that her parents modeled. Within their home, her mother and aunts participated in groups that Alma termed "cultural clubs," likely patterned after the Chautauqua model that became wildly popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By participating in the Chautauqua home-study course, the Canteys and their friends read works of English literature, histories of ancient Greece and Rome, narratives of European and American history, and numerous treatises on art history of the Western world.

Cultural events at the Thomas home also included meetings of art clubs, including lessons in painting on velvet by a family friend who had attended Howard University; periodic visits from "a White professor from Atlanta," who gave instruction once or twice a month; and a group of musicians that included Amelia Thomas on the violin.

John Maurice Thomas wrote the following caption for this 1922/23 photo: "Alma and her sister Maurice. The costume made and designed by my mother. Picture made in the back yard of our home in D.C." Collection of The Columbus Museum.

This strong desire and respect for education and culture in all its forms also helped spur the family's move North. When the family relocated in 1907, Alma had finished the ninth grade, which was the highest level of public education available to Black children in Muscogee County until 1930.

Without money to send his daughters to school in Atlanta or Nashville, John Thomas believed a move to Washington was necessary because "to live, you have to be educated." Alma Thomas surely lived up to her father's dreams in this regard, becoming the first fine arts graduate of Howard University in 1924, and later earning a master's degree in art education from Teachers College, Columbia University, in 1934, and taking art history and painting classes at American University in the 1950s. Her more than forty-five-year teaching career included work at Washington's Shaw Junior High School, as well as an early stint as a kindergarten teacher at the Thomas Garrett Settlement House in Wilmington, Delaware.

1907 image entitled "Our Roots." Collection of The Columbus Museum.

Among the many black-and-white photographs in the Thomas family archive taken during the McDuffies' and Thomases' visit to Columbus and Fort Mitchell in the 1940s, one seems like a mistake. The photographer, standing on the road in front of the home John Thomas and his half-brother built, seemingly focused his lens on the embankment, where the ground was beginning to crumble. The resulting image centers on exposed tree roots. A family member, most likely John Maurice, wrote on the back of the photograph, "Our Roots." Whether written in jest or in earnest, the description is more apt than it may seem.

Alma Woodsey Thomas moved into a home in Washington in 1907 and never left, dying in that city in 1978 at the age of eighty-six. Though she visited family in the Chattahoochee Valley and retained fond memories of her childhood, she never expressed any desire to return to the Deep South. In interviews she spoke about the limited opportunities and segregation that had caused her parents to leave Columbus to seek a new life. The story of her mother insisting her daughters shake the Georgia sand off their shoes became a favorite of both Alma and John Maurice Thomas, who as the long-lived guardian of her sister's legacy repeated it until it became the one-sentence summary of the family's relationship to the South.

Thomas's own adult life and work, however, contain many traces of her Georgia childhood. The elegant, cultured life that her parents made for themselves influenced Thomas's interest in art, museums, and education, as well as her understanding of the importance of African American social circles that played a key role in her professional development as an artist. The flower gardens and flowing creek of her childhood home, as well as the rural landscape of her grandfather's property, influenced her abstract works depicting both earthly nature and celestial musings. Her mother's aptitude for dressmaking can be seen in Thomas's painting techniques and her approach to everyday creativity.

Alma Thomas's origins, both real and embellished, created the sandy yet rock-solid foundation for her own beautiful life.