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7

long journey form Columbus to Washington, D.C. and back again.

Interviewed at the time of her Whitney exhibition, Thomas remembered that the segregation of the Deep South extended even to its museums:

When I was a little girl in Columbus, there were things we could do and things we couldn't.  One of the things we couldn't do was go into museums, let alone think of hanging our pictures there.  My, times have changed.

Art museums and galleries were an integral part of Thomas's evolution as an artist.  She was an inveterate gallery-goer all of her life.  Recalling her first trip to the Corcoran, she said: "I've been going to galleries and museums all my life and I'm talking as far back as 1908.  I looked at everything, I loved it, even times when I didn't know what I was looking for . . ."4  The culmination of this life in museums came in 1972, when the Whitney gave her a one-woman exhibition in the Lobby Gallery--the first black woman accorded such an honor.  Her pride and joy were evident: "Who would have ever dreamed that somebody like me would make it to the Whitney in New York?  I'm a 77-year-old Negro woman, after all, who was born in Columbus, Georgia."5

Alma Thomas was born on September 22, 1891,6 the eldest child of Amelia Cantey and John Harris Thomas.  Both parents were the products of inter-racial unions, although Mrs. Thomas's was a generation removed.  This circumstance placed the Thomas family in the "mulatto aristocracy" of the black