Alma Woodsey Thomas was born on September 22, 1891, in Columbus, Georgia, the eldest of four daughters.
Alma Woodsey Thomas was born on September 22, 1891, in Columbus, Georgia, to John Harris Thomas and Amelia Cantey Thomas. She was the eldest of four daughters in a middle-class African American family that valued education and the arts.
In 1907, seeking to escape the racial violence and limited opportunities of the Jim Crow South, the Thomas family relocated to Washington, D.C. This move proved pivotal, granting young Alma access to better educational institutions than were available in segregated Georgia, and exposing her to the vibrant intellectual and artistic community that would later flourish as part of the Howard University milieu.
Her childhood in Columbus, though marked by the racial segregation of the era, also included early exposure to color, pattern, and craft through her mother's dressmaking and the family's encouragement of creative pursuits. This foundation of familial support and relocation to a Northern-adjacent city set the stage for Thomas's remarkable, decades-long journey from segregated Georgia to becoming one of the most celebrated American abstract painters of the twentieth century.