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large, comfortable Victorian home. "It was the first house built in that vicinity; no 2. later it became a desirable neighborhood," recalled Alma, the eldest of their four children. She and her sisters, Kathryn May, Fannie Cantey, and John Maurice*, spent summers in Fort Mitchell, where their grandfather read to them from the newspaper, discussed politics and challenged them with spelling contests. Thomas described the [[strikethrough]] estate [[/strikethrough]] plantation as a "...gorgeous sight -- beautiful flowers as far as you could see. And the cotton, white with a bit of pink, and bell-shaped."* An oil painting of 1952, Grandfather's House, evokes the nostalgic quality of her youth. She employs a relatively dark palette combining brush and palette knife strokes to place figures in a tree lined yard, reclining lazily in the summer's heat.

As a young child, Alma evinced an interest in "building things."* Beautiful flower gardens and unusual circular floral beds around the family home nurtured her seminal interest in nature. [[strikethrough]] A professor came from Atlanta to the Thomas home twice a month to instruct the children in Latin, history and the classics. [[/strikethrough]] As John Maurice recalls, "Education in Columbus was not available for [[strikethrough]] young [[/strikethrough]] colored children past the ninth grade. After that, you had to go away to high school."* The only library in the city did not allow African Americans: "...the only way to go in there as a Negro would be with a mop and bucket to work and scrub something."* ?

With the turn of the century, racial tensions increased, as did anti-black activities in Georgia. On September 22, 1906, Alma's fifteenth birthday, a riot

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