1. Fredericka Carolyn "Fredi" Washington was an American stage and film actress, civil rights activist, performer, and writer.
22 Facts About Fredi Washington
1. 2.
Fredi Washington was one of the first Black Americans to gain recognition for film and stage work in the 1920s and 1930s.
3.
Fredi Washington plays a young light-skinned Black woman who decides to pass as white.
4.
Fredi Washington was born in 1903 in Savannah, Georgia, to Robert T Washington, a postal worker, and Harriet "Hattie" Walker Ward, a dancer.
5.
Fredi Washington's mother died when Fredi was 11 years old.
6.
Fredi Washington graduated from Julia Richman High School in New York City.
7.
Fredi Washington was hired by dancer Josephine Baker as a member of the "Happy Honeysuckles", a cabaret group.
8.
Fredi Washington quickly became a popular, featured dancer, and toured internationally with her dancing partner, Al Moiret.
9.
Fredi Washington acted in a small role in The Emperor Jones starring Robeson.
10.
Fredi Washington played Cab Calloway's love interest in the musical short Cab Calloway's Hi-De-Ho.
11.
Fredi Washington played a young light-skinned Black woman who chose to pass as white to seek more opportunities in a society restricted by legal and social racial segregation.
12.
Fredi Washington was deeply involved with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, known as the NAACP.
13.
Fredi Washington was a lobbyist for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which the NAACP supported.
14.
Fredi Washington played opposite Bill Robinson in Fox's One Mile from Heaven, in which she played a light-skinned Black woman claiming to be the mother of a "white" baby.
15.
Fredi Washington appeared in the 1939 Broadway production of Mamba's Daughters, along with Ethel Waters and Georgette Harvey.
16.
Fredi Washington had a dramatic role in a 1943 radio tribute to Black women, Heroines in Bronze, produced by the National Urban League, but there were few regular dramatic radio programs in that era with Black protagonists.
17.
Fredi Washington was a theater writer, and the entertainment editor for The People's Voice, a newspaper for African Americans founded by Adam Clayton Powell Jr.
18.
Fredi Washington was married to her sister Isabel Washington Powell.
19.
In 1933, Fredi Washington married Lawrence Brown, the trombonist in Duke Ellington's jazz orchestra.
20.
In 1952, Fredi Washington married a Stamford dentist, Hugh Anthony Bell, and moved to Greenwich, Connecticut.
21.
Fredi Washington Bell died, aged 90, on June 28,1994.
22.
Fredi Washington died from pneumonia following a series of strokes at St Joseph Medical Center in Stamford, Connecticut.