Camilla Williams

Camilla Ella Williams was born on the eighteenth of October 1919 at Danville, Virginia, the daughter of Cornelius Williams — a chauffeur and a former church soloist of the Danville Loyal Baptist Church — and Fannie Carey Williams, a domestic worker and pianist of the same congregation. She was raised in the Danville Black tobacco-country household of her parents and educated at the Danville Westmoreland Coloured High School.

She took the bachelor’s in music at the Virginia State College at Petersburg in 1941 — among the early Black bachelor’s graduates of the institution — and took further private voice study at the Philadelphia Musical Academy under Madame Marian Szekely-Freschl from 1942 to 1944 on the Marian Anderson scholarship — the first Black recipient of the scholarship Anderson had established the previous year.

She was hired by the Maxwell House Show Boat radio programme on NBC in March 1944 as a featured soloist and gave her formal New York Town Hall debut on the seventeenth of March 1946. Olin Downes of the New York Times reviewed the recital as ‘a lyric soprano of unusual gifts, of rare freshness of tone and intelligence of style.’

She was contracted by László Halász, the founding general director of the New York City Opera Company, on the fifteenth of May 1946 in the title role of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly — opening the spring 1946 season at the City Center on the fifteenth of May 1946. The contract was the first regular operatic contract awarded by a major American opera company to a Black singer.

She sang at the New York City Opera across the following nine seasons in twenty-three productions — among them Mimì in La bohème, Nedda in Pagliacci, Aïda, Saraswati in the world premiere of David Tamkin’s The Dybbuk of 1951, and the title role in Massenet’s Manon.

She sang the National Anthem at the Lincoln Memorial on the twenty-eighth of August 1963 — the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom — immediately preceding Martin Luther King Jr.’s (placed in this archive) I Have a Dream address.

She taught voice at the Brooklyn College Conservatory of Music from 1970 to 1973 and at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music from 1977 to 1997.

She died at Bloomington, Indiana on the twenty-ninth of January 2012 of complications of cancer, at ninety-two.

She is honored here as the first contracted Black singer at a major American opera company.