[ Her name was Fredi Washington and she descended on Hollywood
with a burning mission: to redefine white America’s image of African
American women.]
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THE BLACK ACTRESS WHO REFUSED TO PASS  
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Jasmin Darznik
August 7, 2022
Hollywood Progressive
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_ Her name was Fredi Washington and she descended on Hollywood with a
burning mission: to redefine white America’s image of African
American women. _

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_Originally published in Messy Nessy Chic_

In 1934, a young woman stepped off the train in Los Angeles’ Union
Station. Even in a city swarming with beauties, eyes would’ve
fastened on her. She was astonishingly lovely — tall and lithe, with
dark glossy hair she wore pulled back in a style that offset her
porcelain skin and blue eyes. Everyone who saw her that day thought
she was white. She wasn’t. They’d think she was just another
aspiring starlet. She wasn’t that either. Her name was Fredi
Washington and she descended on Hollywood with a burning mission: to
redefine white America’s image of African American women.

[She-was-the-Black-Actress-Who-Refused-to-Pass]

Born Fredricka Carolyn Washington in Savannah, Georgia, she was the
daughter of a postal worker and former dancer and the eldest of nine
children. Everyone called her Fredi. By the time she was sixteen, New
York beckoned. These were the early years of the Harlem Renaissance,
when an electrifying energy emanated from the neighborhood’s
theatres, restaurants, churches, beauty parlors; when ragtime
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blues, and jazz boomed from its countless dancehalls, bars, and music
halls; when the arts, in every form, were being reimagined and revived
by Harlemites.

In 1921 word got around Harlem that a new all-black production was
hiring dancers.

“It wasn’t that I wanted to get into show business,” she’d
reflect years later. “But somebody told me they were paying more to
chorus girls than I was making as a bookkeeper.”

She’d never danced on stage — hadn’t even set foot in a theatre,
but she slapped on some lipstick (another first) and with that she
threw herself in with the other hopefuls.

The show was _Shuffe Along, _the first Broadway show created,
produced, and performed by African Americans. Washington was hired as
one of the “Happy Honeysuckles,” earning a wage of $30 a
week—twice what she’d been making as a bookkeeper.

The eleven “honeys” were chosen as much for their fair complexions
as their dancing chops and singing talent. It was understood that only
women who passed the “brown paper bag test” got hired. The odious
practice was used openly during castings until the 1950s, as well as
amongst upper class Black American societies such as sororities,
fraternities, even churches. Only those with a skin colour that
matched or was lighter than a brown paper bag would be allowed
admission, membership privileges, or get hired for certain jobs.

A girl named Josephine Baker
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passed the test – but only just. The darker-complexioned Baker was
teased and tormented by the other chorines. During one especially
cruel episode, Washington stood up for her. They became lifelong
friends.

_Shuffle Along_ was a huge hit. After its New York run, the show
toured for three years and was the first Black musical to play in
white theatres across the United States, creating a rare bridge in the
country’s toxic racial divide.

When the show closed for good, Washington went on to perform at the
swanky Club Alabam’, which, like Harlem’s infamous Cotton Club
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featured Black performers but catered exclusively to wealthy white
patrons. Here, a besotted Wall Street millionaire urged her to assume
a French name, offering to pay her tuition at the prestigious Theatre
Guild School if she agreed to pass as French.

“But I want to be who I am,” she told him, refusing his offer,
“nothing else.”

She performed on New York stages all through the 1920s, but with scant
roles available to her, she eventually hightailed it to Europe, where
for two years, she headlined a ballroom dance team of Fredi et Moiret.
Washington and her partner performed in Paris, Nice, Berlin, Dresden
and Hamburg. In London she taught the Prince of Wales the “Black
Bottom,” the latest dance craze to have jumped over the pond.

From the short: “Black and Tan”, 1929 with Duke Ellington, leading
off is Fredi Washington in a classic example of a so called “Jungle
Dance”. These demeaning but energetic dances were hugely popular
with the white patrons of the Cotton Club and other Harlem nightspots
in the 1920’s.

Like her friend Josephine Baker (who by then had Paris in the palm of
her hand), Washington discovered that Europe offered a far freer
atmosphere for African Americans. Unlike Baker, she chose to return to
America.

[“Director requires in the leading role, a young girl who must be of
Negro blood but must be absolutely white.”]

_“Director requires in the leading role, a young girl who must be of
Negro blood but must be absolutely white.”_

This was the Hollywood casting call that went out for _Imitation of
Life. _Adapted from a popular 1933 novel by Fanny Hurst, it’s the
story of two mothers, one white, one Black, who meet and become
friends and then business partners. The most dramatic storyline
centres on Peola, the light-skinned daughter of the Black mother, who
crosses the colour line — with tragic results.

In a departure from what was then the standard practice of hiring
white actors to play Black characters, the film’s director, John
Strahl, was keen to find a “White Negro” for the role of Peola, a
woman “so white that not even her own lover would realize the secret
of her birth.” He traveled the country and considered over three
hundred actresses. When Stahl saw Fredi Washington on a New York
stage, he knew he’d found his Peola.

No sooner had negotiations started than Washington insisted on being
paid what she was worth — a revolutionary notion in Hollywood. She
also refused to sign a four-year contract, reasoning that
after _Imitation of Life_, the studio would have stuck her in roles
she had no interest in playing.

“Look,” she told John Stahl. “I didn’t come here to learn to
act. I brought that with me. I’ve been on Broadway. You don’t have
to sell me a bill of goods, because you can’t. Because I’m really
not that interested. It doesn’t matter to me whether I make this
picture of whether I don’t, because I know one thing — if I make
it and I’m good, you’re not going to have another script for me so
I wouldn’t want to be thrown in a western here or this-or-that
there.”

_Imitation of Life_ was a runaway box office hit. As one of the first
films to suggest, if even only obliquely, that America had a “race
problem,” it hit a nerve with both white and Black communities. The
film garnered three Academy Award nominations.

[She-was-the-Black-Actress-Who-Refused-to-Pass-3]

White audiences tended to conflate Washington with the character of
Peola, assuming she herself endorsed and even practiced passing. But
she’d never identified as anything other than Black. The
“tragic mulatto
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trope (a person one Black parent) suggested self-loathing, isolation,
and exile, but Washington played the role with a nuance that seemed
lost on many people. Black audiences, meanwhile, tended to interpret
the film as Washington herself did: the rebellion of a Black woman
trying to gain the privileges only given to white people.

“How many people do you think there are in this country who do not
have mixed blood?” she asked one reporter. “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.”

In the end Hollywood didn’t know what to do with her. With her sleek
sophistication, producers wouldn’t cast her as a Black a maid, but
neither would they cast her in any of the roles on offer for white
actresses. She’d be told many times that her refusal to pass came at
a price. She could’ve been as big as the biggest stars of the
period, Joan Crawford and Greta Garbo, maybe bigger.

“Why should I have to pass for anything but an artist?” she
demanded.

After _Imitation of Life_, she stayed in Hollywood because she
thought she might play a role in changing how the film industry, and
therefore America, saw African Americans. Like other early Black
performers, she carried a mantel for her race at what must have often
been a personal toll. Like Dorothy Dandridge and Lena Horne, two
light-skinned actresses who’d come up in the forties and fifties,
she’d be forced to darken her skin. Even then, her roles were
confined to tragic mulattoes or exotic temptresses.

After five years she was done with thin scripts and jezebel roles and
silly plots; she was sick of tolerating poor treatment and waiting for
roles that never materialized. She returned to New York where, in
1937, she co-founded the Negro Actors Guild of America and worked with
the NAACP. She criticized the treatment of African Americans in the
entertainment business, such as the requirement that they enter the
stage from a back door or put up with shoddy living quarters when
touring.

[She-was-the-Black-Actress-Who-Refused-to-Pass-1-1]

In 1943, she joined the staff of the _People’s Voice_. Founded by
future Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., _People’s Voice_ set a
standard for Black journalism. Initially Washington worked on its
public relations team, but soon she began filling in for columnists.
Eventually she got her own column, writing over 200 pieces of drama,
film, and media criticism.

Her pieces for the magazine are smart and sometimes unsparing in their
honesty; her writerly voice is vivid and bold. She also took on
broader social issues, as when she criticized the treatment of Black
soldiers during and after World War II. At the end of every piece,
she’d sign off with her trademark call to action.

When she returned to Hollywood in the 1950s, it was in an entirely new
capacity. She worked as a casting consultant for the breakthrough
films, including _Carmen Jones_ and _Porgy and Bess_. A realist as
well as a fighter, she understood the industry might never fully
address its race problem. In the meantime, and until her death in
1994, she threw herself into the new roles she created for herself —
advocate and activist.

_JASMIN DARZNIK is the New York Times bestselling author of The
Bohemians [[link removed]], a novel that imagines
the friendship between photographer Dorothea Lange and her Chinese
American assistant in 1920s San Francisco. A New York Times summer
2021 recommendation, The Bohemians is also one of Oprah
Daily's best books of historical fiction for 2021._

* Fredi Washington
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* lack of Diversity in Hollywood films
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* social activism
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* actors
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