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of a Florence, Alabama school, infiltrated meetings of the Ku Klux Klan and passed on information to his brother in New York. Two other sons, Edward, a graduate of the Howard University School of Pharmacy, and James, owned a drugstore in Denver, Colorado.

Most of the Cantey daughters were schoolteachers educated at Tuskegee Institute: Amanda taught in Dallas; Mamie, at Grandfather Cantey's plantation school; and Annie at the Institute prior to her marriage to Mr. Garner. A housing project was named after another daughter, Elizabeth, Alma's Aunt Lizzie, for her fifty years of teaching in the Columbus Public Schools. 12 Thus, education and striving for upward social mobility were very much a part of the whole mentality of the close family network in which Alma was raised. 

In 1888, a fifth daughter, Amelia, married John Harris Thomas who was the son of a black mother and white father. John Harris, who, as Alma noted later, "looked Italian," 13 prospered in the liquor business. Encountering "trouble concerning his liquor license," 14 he became the manager of the Muskogee Club, a gathering place for the wealthy whites of Columbus. Highly respected by the Club members, he often hunted with them. 15

Thomas later recalled an incident that illustrated the high regard in which her father was held by the entire community: