Fredericka Carolyn “Fredi” Washington (December 23, 1903 – June 28, 1994) was an American dramatic film actress, one of the first to gain recognition for her work in film and on stage. She was active during the period known as the Harlem Renaissance (1920s-1930s). She is best known for her role as “Peola” in the 1934 version of the film Imitation of Life, in which she plays a young light-skinned black woman who decides to pass as white. Her last film role was in One Mile from Heaven (1937), after which she left Hollywood and returned to New York to work in theatre and civil rights.
Fredi Washington was born in 1903 in Savannah, Georgia to Robert T. Washington, a postal worker, and Harriet Walker Ward, a former dancer. Both were of African-American and European ancestry. Fredi was the second of their five children. Her mother, Hattie, died when Fredi was eleven years old. As the oldest girl in her family, Fredi helped raise her younger siblings, Isabel, Rosebud and Robert, with the help of their grandmother, whom the family called “Big Mama.” After their mother’s death, Fredi was sent to the St. Elizabeth’s Convent School for colored girls in Cornwells Heights, near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her sister, Isabel, soon followed her. At some point her father, Robert T. Washington, remarried. His second wife died while pregnant. He later married a third time and had four children with his last wife. Fredi had a total of eight siblings from her father’s two families.
While Fredi was still in school in Philadelphia, her family moved North to Harlem, New York in the Great Migration for work and opportunity in the industrial North. Fredi followed her family to Harlem, where she graduated from Julia Richman High School in New York City. Washington’s career began dancing in nightclubs. From 1922 to 1926, she toured with Sissle and Blake’s Shuffle Along.
Fredi’s performing career began in 1921, when she got a chance to work in New York City, where she was living with her grandmother and aunt. She was a chorus girl in the hit Broadway musical Shuffle Along. She was hired by dancer Josephine Baker as a member of the “Happy Honeysuckles,” a cabaret group. Baker also became a friend and mentor to her. Washington’s friendship with Baker, as well as her talent as a performer, led to her being discovered by producer Lee Shubert. In 1926, Washington was recommended for a co-starring role on the Broadway stage with Paul Robeson in Black Boy. She was very attractive, as well as a talented entertainer, and she easily moved up to become a popular featured dancer. She toured internationally with her dancing partner Al Moiret; they were especially popular in London.
Assuming the stage name Edith Warren, she was cast as the lead in Black Boy with Paul Robeson in 1926. With work hard to find in America she toured Europe, some of her engagements included Gaumount Palace and Chateau Madrid (Paris), Casino Nice, Green Park Hotel (London), Trocadero and Floria Palast (Berlin). Washington was cast in Sweet Chariot (1930) in New York, Singin’ the Blues (1931, and Run, Little Chillun (1933).
Her film career began concurrently with performances in Black and Tan Fantasy (1929), The Old Man and the Mountain, and The Emperor Jones (1933); she married Lawrence Brown of the Duke Ellington Band later that year. One of Washington’s primary concerns was the relationship between black and white women. She brought to the medium a new conception of African-American women in general and no where was this better displayed than her role in the film Imitation of Life (1934). So convincing was Washington’s portrayal of the tragic Mulatto, that many felt she was (in real life) anti-black.
Friends like Bobby Short and her sister’s husband, Congressman Adam Clayton Powell said that she never hid behind the lightness of her complexion. Washington’s commitment to civil rights was just as strong as her professionalism in the theater and cinema arts. She was one of the founders of the Negro Actors Guild and from 1937 to 1938 was the organization’s secretary. She was administrative secretary for the Joint Actors Equity-Theater League Committee on Hotel Accommodations for Negro Actors throughout the United States.
Washington was on radio in the Jewish immigrant comedy The Goldbergs, and performed specials for the National Urban League on CBS radio. Other films include Drums of the Jungle (1935) and One Mile From Heaven (1937). She also appeared in the stage production of Lysistra (1946), A Long Way From Home (1948) and How Long Till Summer (1949). In 1952, she married Anthony Bell, a dentist, and was inducted into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame in 1975.
Throughout her life, Washington was often asked if she ever wanted to “pass” for white. Washington, a proud black woman, answered conclusively, “No.” She said this repeatedly, “I don’t want to pass because I can’t stand insincerities and shams. I am just as much Negro as any of the others identified with the race.”
“I have never tried to pass for white and never had any desire, I am proud of my race. In ‘Imitation of Life’, I was showing how a girl might feel under the circumstances but I am not showing how I felt.”
“I am an American citizen and by God, we all have inalienable rights and wherever those rights are tampered with, there is nothing left to do but fight…and I fight. How many people do you think there are in this country who do not have mixed blood, there’s very few if any, what makes us who we are, are our culture and experience. No matter how white I look, on the inside I feel black. There are many whites who are mixed blood, but still go by white, why such a big deal if I go as Negro, because people can’t believe that I am proud to be a Negro and not white. To prove I don’t buy white superiority I chose to be a Negro.”
Fredi Washington died on June 28, 1994 at the age of 91.