PIONEER BLACK OPERA SINGER CAMILLA WILLIAMS, DIES AT 92

Camilla Williams

Opera singer, Camilla Williams, largely remembered with the distinction of being the first black woman to perform with a major US opera company, passed away at the age of 92 on Sunday, January 29, 2012.
The singer who was also a cultural ambassador and civil rights activist reportedly died at her home in Bloomington, Indiana, after complications associated with a terminal illness.
A spokesperson for the school of music where she taught also confirmed the incident.
‘I can confirm that she died at home of complications from cancer’, Alan Barker, a spokesman for Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music where Williams taught for 20 years, told reporters.
Williams was born in Danville, Virginia, on Oct. 18, 1919, the daughter of a chauffeur. Her grandfather was a singer and choir leader, her parents were both musicians and by age eight she was playing piano and singing in Danville’s Calvary Baptist Church.
She trained at Virginia State College and began teaching school, before earning a scholarship that allowed her to study privately in New York and Philadelphia. She earned a Marian Anderson Fellowship in 1943 and 1944.
After being discovered by an agent, Williams began her career in 1944 with the RCA radio network.
She was said to have received death threats when it was learned a black woman had been cast as the operatic Madama Butterfly at the New York City opera.
She is widely acknowledged to have broken racial divides in the field of opera especially after she became the first black singer to sing with the Vienna State Opera in a 1954 production of Madama Butterfly.
Internationally, she also sang with the Royal Philharmonic, BBC Symphony, Berlin Philharmonic and the New York Philharmonic. She was also known for her interpretations of Mahler, making several recordings before giving up her opera career in 1971.
Williams sang the national anthem at the White House in 1963, the same year she sang before 200,000 people prior to Martin Luther King’s legendary ‘I Have a Dream’ speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington.
A lifetime member of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), she performed in her hometown of Danville in 1963 to raise funds to free jailed civil rights demonstrators.
She taught for 20 years at Indiana University’s Jacob School of Music, retiring in 1997. During a 1983 trip to China, she also became the first black professor to teach at Beijing’s Central Conservatory.
In 2011 her autobiography ‘The Life of Camilla Williams, African American Classical Singer and Diva‘ was published.
She is survived by her husband, Charles T. Beavers, one of the principal attorneys for civil rights leader Malcolm X.