Fredi Washington wowed audiences in the first version of Imitation of Life released in 1934 by Universal Pictures. Starring Claudette Colbert, Louise Beavers, Warren William, and Rochelle Hudson, Washington didn’t make the cut in movie posters released for most theaters and was billed sixth despite playing a pivotal role. Adapted from Fannie Hurst’s bestselling novel the film was a melodrama about the plight of working and single mothers during the Depression, deep friendship between a White widow and a Black mother, and the harsh realities of race in segregated America. Washington played Peola, the daughter of Beavers who comes to work as a maid for Colbert in exchange for room and board. She is the same age as Colbert’s daughter and they grow up together in a household where the mistress and servant essentially co-parent both girls.
As they come of age the light skin Peola decides to pass for White to enter the world of virtual sibling. It both breaks her mother’s heart and leads to inevitable tragedy when her ruse is uncovered. In 1934 it was a daring and controversial film that treated all of its characters with dignity and respect.
Knowing that the theme would cost distribution in the Jim Crow South and even in many Northern cities, Universal hoped to recoup some of its losses by launching an unprecedented major studio campaign to sell the film to Black audiences in segregated theaters. Posters prominently featuring Beavers and Washington were printed and a special trailer just for the Black cinemas was shot. It worked. African-American audiences flocked to see the film.
Ironically although Washington played a young woman passing for White, she adamantly refused to do so in real life and it cost her career dearly. She was stung not only by White racism but by the fact that many Blacks thought that she like Peola rejected her people and resented her for it. Years later she told the Chicago Defender in 1945:
Early in my career it was suggested that I might get further by passing as French or something exotic. But to pass, for economic or other advantages, would have meant that I swallowed, whole hog, the idea of Black inferiority…You see I’m a mighty proud gal, and I can’t for the life of me find any valid reason why anyone should lie about their origin, or anything else for that matter. Frankly, I do not ascribe to the stupid theory of white supremacy and to try to hide the fact that I am a Negro for economic or any other reasons. If I do, I would be agreeing to be a Negro makes me inferior and that I have swallowed whole hog all of the propaganda dished out by our fascist-minded white citizens.
Other actresses have made a different choice. In the early silent movie era, especially in films made in and around urban centers especially New York and Chicago, several performers recruited from vaudeville, and chorus lines reportedly had parts in two-reelers. Later some went on to real stardom passing for White. Washington’s contemporary Merle Oberon became an Oscar-winning star of both British and American films while carefully concealing her birth in India on February 19, 1911 of Welsh and Ceylonese (now Sri Lankan) parents. She took her secret to her grave. It wasn’t until decades after her death in 1979 at age 68 that her true origins became known. Broadway star Carol Channing, the original Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, had an African American and German father who also passed for White and a German-Jewish mother, She did not disclose her heritage until 2002 when she was 81.
Washington was a stunning young woman with green eyes, delicate—read non-Negroid—features, and a creamy complexion. She was also a veteran performer and a highly skilled dancer, singer, and actress who should have had all the attributes for a major Hollywood career. But it was not to be.
Fredericka Carolyn “Fredi” Washington was born in 1903 in Savannah, Georgia to postal worker Robert T. Washington and dancer Harriet “Hattie” Walker Ward. Both had mixed African-American and European ancestry. She was the second of their five children. Her mother died when Fredi was 11 years old. As the oldest girl in her family, she helped raise her younger siblings, Isabel, Rosebud, and Robert, with the help of their grandmother. After their mother’s death, Fredi and Isabel were sent to the St. Elizabeth’s Convent School for Colored Girls in Cornwells Heights, near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her father remarried, but his second wife died while pregnant. He married a third time and had four additional children.
Washington’s family moved north to Harlem in New York City during the Great Migration. She graduated from Julia Richman High School. It was the blooming era of the Harlem Renaissance and presented many opportunities to the talented young woman and led her to cross paths with many of its outstanding performers.
By age 18 in 1921 Fredi was dancing at the famed Cotton Club where Josephine Baker discovered her and hired her to be part of a cabaret trio, the Happy Honeysuckles. Baker continued to mentor the young performer and introduced he to important people in the entertainment industry like producer Lee Shubert. She broke into Broadway in the all-Black musical Shuffle Along in 1922 as a chorus girl and toured with the road show for two years. Her film debut came that same year in the all-Black boxing drama Square Joe. In 1926, she was recommended for a co-starring role on Broadway with Paul Robeson in the play, Black Boy. Washington had an off and on relationship with Robeson for several years. She also became a popular featured dancer and toured internationally with her dancing partner, Al Moiret.
In 1929 Washington made her talkie debut in Black and Tan Fantasy, an early two reel sound short with Duke Ellington as the doomed dancer wife of the struggling band leader. She toured with Ellington’s Orchestra and had an affair with the married maestro. She had a small uncredited role in the Marx Brother’s first film Animal Crackers in 1930.
In 1933 she teamed with Robeson again in a small role in the film version of Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor Jones in which her skin was darkened with makeup for fear that audiences might think Robeson was actually filming love scenes with a White woman. Another significant appearance was with Cab Calloway who she had known since her Cotton Club days in his classic musical short Hi-De-Ho in 1934.
Washington wanted to expand her film acting career but was crippled by her complexion which was too light for the cheaply made films for Black theaters. Several important Hollywood figures reportedly offered to make her a star equal to or greater than Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Constance Bennett, and Greta Garbo if she would assume a new name and identity and pass as White. She flatly refused.
The part in Imitation of Life was her big break. But it also outed her a Black and typed her as “the tragic mulatto.” Parts were hard to find. She did land a staring role as a vengeful Black Haitian plantation owner in the extremely low budget zombie exploitation flick Ouanga (also known as The Love Wanga) in 1936.
Washington got one more chance to shine in Hollywood in 20th Century Fox’s 1937 film One Mile from Heaven starring Clair Trevor as a nosey newspaper woman who investigates why an octoroon mother is raising an apparently white child. The part of the child was originally written for Shirley Temple, but the studio shied from risking their biggest asset in such a potentially explosive film. Washington, of course was the target of the investigation. The film also featured Bill “Bojangles” Robbinson. After that Fredi’s movie career was over.
But not her acting career. In 1939 DuBose Heyward, the author of the book George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess was based on, adapted another one of his slice-of-life novels about the racial complexity of his hometown, Charleston, South Carolina into a play with his wife Dorothy. Mamba’s Daughters was mounted on Broadway as a star turn for Ethel Waters. Washington co-starred as the light skinned daughter. The play featured songs by Jerome Kern and opened at the Empire Theater running for 162 performances. In 1940 it had a brief revival at the Broadway Theater. Significantly Washington was one of the original cast members who performed selections from the musical on the ground-breaking Ethel Waters Show, one-hour television variety special that ran in the earliest days of NBC, on June 14, 1939. That experimental broadcast to the handful of TV sets in New York made Waters the first Black performer, male or female, to have her own TV show.
Later in the 1940’s Washington appeared with her sister Isabel as a featured dancer in some New York productions and was a casting consultant for the 1943 production of Carmen Jones and a revival of Porgy and Bess.
Despite her affairs with Ellington and Robeson (and perhaps others) Washington married Lawrence Brown, one of Duke’s trombone players in 1933. They divorced in 1951. A year later she married dentist Dr. Hugh Anthony Bell and retired from performing to live in Greenwich, Connecticut.
But Washington’s greatest contributions may have come from her tireless devotion to Civil Rights work. In the 1930’s she worked closely with Walter White of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) on a variety of causes but especially on anti-lynching campaigns. In 1937 Washington co-founded the Negro Actors Guild of America (NAG), with Noble Sissle, rag-time composer W. C. Handy, Robeson, and Waters. The organization’s mission included speaking out against stereotyping and advocating for a wider range of roles. She served as the organization’s first executive secretary.
Washington had a dramatic role in Heroines in Bronze, a 1943 radio tribute to Black women, produced by the National Urban League.
Partnering with sister Isabel’s husband, Harlem preacher Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, brought Fredi new opportunities. In 1943 she joined his new newspaper People’s Voice which soon became the most influential Black paper in New York and a powerful advocate for Civil Rights and a progressive agenda. Powell used the paper to project his opinions and make him the undisputed political king of Harlem. Washington was a theater writer, and the entertainment editor for People’s Voice and contributed other articles and opinion pieces. In 1944 Powell was elected to Congress in no small part due to the influence of the journal. In 1945 Powell divorced Isabel and married glamorous pianist and singer Hazel Scott.
As for Fredi, she enjoyed a comfortable retirement in Connecticut until she died at age 90 on June 28, 1994 from pneumonia following a series of strokes at St. Joseph Medical Center in Stamford, Connecticut. She was forgotten by White audiences who barely knew her and even by the many African-American performers for whom she blazed a brave trail.
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