Fredericka Carolyn “Fredi” Washington was born with fair skin and green eyes, and with the racism very apparent in 1930s Hollywood, she could have made a success in her career if she decided to “Pass”. However, Fredi didn’t. She went as far as playing a role in the 1934 movie “Imitation of Life” as Peola, an African American woman who decides to pass as white to escape racial discrimination,
Fredi’s career suffered greatly because she refused to act like racial segregation was not a thing. She was denied roles for not denying her African American heritage, but she didn’t bend. A known fact is that the only moment she “passed” was to buy snacks from bars that attended to only whites for her band members, who they refused to serve.
Frederika Washington was the daughter of a dancer and a postal worker. She was born in 1903 in Savannah, Georgia. During the Great migration, she moved alongside her family to Harlem.
She became part of the “Happy Honeysuckles”, singer Josephine Baker’s cabaret dance group and travelled worldwide and in Europe as a dancer. After that, she joined the Harlem Renaissance, the 20th-century movement that promoted black culture and image.
This while appearing as an actress and a chorus girl in stage productions in New York. She soon joined Duke Ellington’s band to perform, travelling with them too.
Imitation of Life was described as one of the most influential films to have ever been made on the topic of race. It was a best seller in the black community, and eventually, it was nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award.
She found it difficult to get roles as the Hollywood scene then involved using race to get parts, and they couldn’t cast Fredi as a made because of her fair skin. In a 1945 interview with the Chicago Defender, she said, “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.”
Her last significant film role was in “One Mile from Heaven”, where she played the role of an African American woman raising an abandoned white child in 1937. She founded the Negro Actors Guild of America, a group that struggled for better working conditions for Black actors in the same year.
One of her famous statements was, “I am an American citizen, and by God, we all have inalienable rights, and whenever and wherever those rights are tampered with, there is nothing left to do but fight…and I fight.”
Fredi became a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and an activist, fighting for equal rights. She died in 1994.
