Alma Stone Williams

Williams is featured in “Fully Awake,” a documentary about Black Mountain College released in 2008. As of 2013, there were two other films in process about Williams.

In 1945, after attending Black Mountain College, Williams received a second Julius Rosenwald Fellowship to attend Juilliard in New York City. Later on, Williams received a second master's degree in musicology, from the University of Maryland, where she wrote an acclaimed master's thesis on Brahms.

Alma Stone Williams was highly educated. She attended Spelman College at the age of 15, majoring in English and music, and graduating valedictorian. Afterwards, she received her M.A. degree in English from Atlanta University. Williams began her teaching career at Penn School on St. Helena Island in South Carolina. Afterwards, educator Horace Mann Bond hired Williams to teach at Fort Valley State College; furthermore, he nominated her to attend Black Mountain College in the summer of 1944. In the spring of 1944, Mrs. Williams received her first scholarship from the Rosenwald Fund to make her attendance at Black Mountain possible.

In 1944, Williams became the first black student at Black Mountain College, ten years before the United States Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka declaring state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional. In a 2008 profile in the Asheville, North Carolina Urban News; Williams commented on her pioneering desegregation:

Alma Stone Williams (April 26, 1921 - November 5, 2013) was a musician, educator, music scholar, and pioneer in racial integration. Williams attended the 1944 Summer Music Institute. She was the first African-American student to be enrolled at Black Mountain College and the first black student to openly integrate a Southern white college.