"An All-Out Fight": Fredi Washington's Print Crusade Against White Supremacy1
Laurie Avant Woodard
Of the invasion of U.S. troops at Normandy in 1944, artist, activist, and media critic Fredi Washington wrote, “To Negroes on the battlefronts in France or a defense factory at home, D-Day has a double significance. It means also the liberation of Negroes wherever they might be who live under homegrown systems of fascism and tyranny.”2 Adhering to the tenets of the Double-V Campaign launched by editors of the African American newspaper the Pittsburgh Courier, Washington equated the nation’s fight for democracy abroad with the fight of black people in the U.S. and around the world for an end to white supremacy, violence, and terrorism. Her determination to fuse her experience and status as an internationally acclaimed performing artist with her concerns for the rights of black people produced a formidable platform from which she demanded change. Steadfast in the knowledge that “you do not have to be white to be good,”3 in the pages of The People’s Voice, Washington denounced the failures of U.S. democracy and insisted upon both the rights and equality of black people. At once a participant in and a reflection of the New Negro Renaissance—the early 20th century movement for social, political, and economic transformation led by black intellectuals, artists, activists, and artist/activists—Washington was an influential actor in the unremitting African American quest for civil and human rights.4
Her tenure at The People’s Voice began in early 1942 when Washington joined the staff as “public relations counsel.” She used her position to champion the war effort and the equality of black women by organizing fundraising events and galvanizing the “equal participation of Negro women in truly democratic morale building.”5 She contributed her first feature story the following fall. Her vivid narrative of her “trying first experience” as a plucky anti-lynching activist, who was drenched with rain while hanging signs with images of “the art work of which [she] was so proud—the end of that lovely rope that the southerners use to lynch the black folks with in the Deep South,” established her as a resonant voice for change.6 In the spring of 1943, when Voice gossip columnist Marienne Boyd took time off to get married, Washington began covering her column Solid Meddlin’. Shortly thereafter she assumed the role of Voice Theatrical Editor and began writing Headlines/Footlights and, later, Odds and Ends, Fredi Says, and Floodlights and Footlights.7 Prior to leaving the Voice in the summer of 1947, Washington would contribute hundreds of columns that delved into race relations, gender, politics, and economics alongside performing arts and culture.
Published by Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. and Harlem entrepreneur Charles Buchanan, The People’s Voice championed the cause of real democracy in the U.S. and around the world.8 Throughout the 1930s, the popular yet controversial Powell became a force in the Harlem community as pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church and Community House and as an organizer and leader of local relief efforts, rent strikes, and campaigns to end discrimination at Harlem Hospital and white-owned businesses in the district. During the early 1940s, seeking to expand his influence, with Buchanan, Powell launched The People’s Voice.9 The first issue appeared in February 1942. The talented and diverse staff included Marvel Cooke and St. Clair Bourne, formerly of the Amsterdam News; Ferdinand Smith of the labor movement; member of the Harlem Communist Party leadership and future member of the New York City Council Benjamin Davis; and Fredi Washington. Bourne recalled, “We wanted to be different, striking in as many ways as we could.”10
Initially, Washington covered the comings and goings of the black performing arts community, highlighting their achievements. For example, she noted that Shuffle Along co-creator Flournoy Miller’s daughter, “an accomplished musician having studied at Julliard School of Music,” was drawing raves as the new harpist with Noble Sissle’s band.11 Yet her wry critique of U.S. racism was never far from the surface. She observed innocently, “Pearl Primus, interpretive-dancer, who opened at downtown Café Society last week, has gotten rave notices from the daily papers.” She added sardonically, “Funny, [white owner] Barney Josephson heard about her, and was trying to locate her while she sat in his outer office getting the run around.”12
Growing up in Savannah, Georgia, suffused in black vernacular culture, Washington honed her sharp wit and resilience at an early age. Later, at nineteen, when she auditioned for Noble Sissle for a place in the line13 in the road company of Shuffle Along, Sissle wanted to know if she had any experience. When he asked her if she could dance, Washington quipped, “I guess I can. I’ve been dancing all day.”14 Her flippant response was evidence of the pragmatic yet ironic view of the world and the audacious attitude she would possess throughout her life. She impressed Sissle, who she remembered, “liked my attitude and the way I looked.”15
With both body and brains, Washington challenged stereotypes about black women and black people and wielded complex modes of power. As a performing artist, she had access to a distinct form of influence: on the stage and screen she could reach audiences who could not read the poetry of Langston Hughes or the prose of W.E.B. Du Bois. Subsequently, she enabled black and white spectators to imagine something different, to envision a world wherein the relationship between black and white people was not defined by Jim Crow segregation, exploitation, and racially motivated violence. She possessed the ability to change people’s minds, rather than exclusively regulate their behavior, as does legislation. Yet, by engaging in activities widely recognized as being “of the mind,” as a writer, Washington dispelled myths about African Americans, women, and performing artists. A rational and autonomous being, capable of independent and intelligent thought and action, Washington challenged both the construction of mind-body separation and stereotypes of blackness as primitive and emotional. Both performative and intellectual, Washington reunited mind and body, rationality and emotion, intellect and art, primitive and modern as she carried her artistic talent, political savvy, and personal moxie beyond the footlights and on to the pages of The People’s Voice.
The columns and articles she wrote for the Voice represent the largest collection of Washington’s writings. However, she also championed the rights of black artists in The Negro Actor, the organ of the Negro Actors Guild of America, Inc. (NAG). Likewise, throughout her life, both before and after her time at the Voice, she was an avid letter writer, engaging in a broad range of topics. Personal correspondence includes the passionate words of a young wife to her new husband, as well as her concerns for the cast and crew of Run Little Chillun, who had worked for dramatically reduced wages to keep the show afloat. When offered a tour of Chillun, even though it would increase her time away from her husband, she felt it was her “duty” and that she “owe[d] it to them,” to accept the offer.16 In a public letter to journalist Darr Smith of the Los Angeles Illustrated Daily News, Washington wrote a scathing indictment of Alfred Werker, director of the 1949 film Lost Boundaries. “I am appalled and not a little fighting mad,” she declared, “to think that a so-called intelligent adult could be so viciously ignorant as to give as his reason for not casting Negroes in the above mentioned [sic] picture that ‘the majority of Negro actors are of the Uncle Tom, Minstrel show, shuffling dancer type of performer.’” She added, that Werker, who made no attempt to cast “Negroes having the physical appearance and ability needed for these roles,” was “simply not interested in learning what he evidently did not know; that there are many legitimate Negro actors and actresses who are far more intelligent than Werker proves himself to be.”17 When frustrations over social and economic hardship exploded into Harlem’s second riot in just over a decade, Washington wrote to Langston Hughes, “The THEATRE is called upon to do all in its power to help… You are, therefore, sincerely urged to attend the [Citizen’s Emergency] meeting,” called by Councilman Powell, “to help formulate plans for an all-out fight against domestic fascism.”18
While the columns she wrote for The People’s Voice represent only one aspect of her experience, Fredi Washington: A Reader in Black Feminist Media Criticism makes the ideas of this extraordinary woman living in extraordinary times almost effortlessly accessible. As someone who began exploring Washington’s life, artistry, activism, and writing long before this collection came into being, I can attest to the myriad challenges of combing through hours, weeks, months, and years of musty manuscript collections and seemingly endless reels of microfilm, not least of all eye and neck strain. Subsequently, I am so grateful to Carol Stabile, Roopika Risam, and their Reanimate team for their painstaking efforts to realize this compendium. My research continues to benefit from it, and I smile when I imagine the ease with which scholars and students will be able to access the thoughts and words of the multitalented and courageous Fredi Washington and her all-out fight for black people.
Some of the ideas and information in this introduction have appeared in The Journal of African American History. Laurie Woodard, “‘A Free America for All Peoples…’: Fredi Washington, the Negro Actors Guild, and the Voice of the People,” The Journal of African American History 105.3 (Summer 2020): 452-478. ↩
Fredi Washington, “Headlines/Footlights,” The People’s Voice, June 17, 1944, 22. On the Double V campaign see, “Democracy. Double VV victory. At Home – Abroad,” Pittsburgh Courier, February 14, 1942, 1; “Courier’s Double ‘V’,” Pittsburgh Courier, February 14, 1942, 1; “What the Afro’s Closed Fist Means,” Afro-American, July 18, 1942, 1, 4; Kimberly Davis, “Fredi Washington, Black Entertainers and the ‘Double V’ Campaign” (master’s thesis, Texas State University-San Marcos, 2006); Harlan Dale Unrau, “The Double V Movement in Los Angeles during the Second World War: A Study in Negro Protest” (master’s thesis, California State College at Fullerton, 1971); Byron Richard Skinner, “The Double ‘V’: The Impact of World War II on Black America” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley California, 1978); Lawrence P. Scott and William Womack, Sr., Double V: The Civil Rights Struggle of the Tuskegee Airmen (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1994); Patrick S. Washburn, A Question of Sedition: The Federal Government’s Investigation of the Black Press during World War II (NY and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 54-55; Hayward Farrar, The Baltimore Afro-American: 1892 – 1950 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998), 167-172. ↩
Norma Jean Darden, “Oh, Sister! Fredi and Isabel Washington Relive 1930s Razzamatazz,” Essence, September 9, 1978, 105. ↩
Unless specifically noted, I use “Negro,” the term Washington and her contemporaries used to describe themselves, interchangeably with “African American” and “black.” For more on Washington’s life and work see, Laurie A. Woodard, Astonishingly Pretty: Fredi Washington and the New Negro Renaissance, forthcoming from Oxford University Press; “‘A Free America for All Peoples…’: Fredi Washington, the Negro Actors Guild, and the Voice of the People,” The Journal of African American History 105.3 (Summer 2020); and “Performing Artists of the Harlem Renaissance: Resistance, Identity, and Meaning in the Life and Work of Fredi Washington from 1920 to 1950 (PhD diss., Yale University, 2007); Emiel Martens, “The 1930s Horror Adventure Film on Location in Jamaica: ‘Jungle Gods,’ ‘Voodoo Drums’ and ‘Mumbo Jumbo’ in the ‘Secret Places of Paradise Island’,” Humanities 10.62 (March 2021): 1-26, https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/10/2/62/htm; Donald Bogle, Hollywood Black: The Stars, the Films, the Filmmakers (New York: Running Press, Hachette Book Group, 2019); Carol A. Stabile, The Broadcast 41: Women and the Anti-Communist Blacklist (London: Goldsmiths Press, 2018); Miriam Petty, Stealing the Show: African American Performers and Audiences in 1930s Hollywood (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2016); Ellen C. Scott, Cinema Civil Rights: Regulation, Representation, and Race in the Classical Hollywood Era (New Brunswick, NJ and London, 2015) and “More than a ‘Passing’ Sophistication: Dress, Film Regulation, and the Color Line in 1930s American Films,” Women’s Studies Quarterly, 41.1-2 (Spring/Summer 2012): 60-86, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23611771; Charlene Regester, African American Actresses: The Struggle for Visibility, 1900-1960 (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010), 107-130; Donald Bogle, Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams: The Story of Black Hollywood (New York: One World Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., 2005); Cheryl Black, “‘New Negro’ Performance in Art and Life: Fredi Washington and the Theatrical Columns of The People’s Voice, 1943-47,” Theatre History Studies 24 (June 2004): 57-72 and “Looking White, Acting Black: Cast(e)ing Fredi Washington,” Theatre Survey 45.1 (May 2004): 19-36; Alicia I. Rodríquez-Estrada, “From Peola to Carmen: Fredi Washington, Dorothy Dandridge, and Hollywood’s Portrayal of the Tragic Mulatto,” in African American Women Confront the West, 1600-2000, edited by Quintard Taylor and Shirley Ann Wilson Moore (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003), 230-247; Anna Everett, Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909 – 1949 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2001); Darlene Clark Hine, ed., Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia (New York: Carlson Publishing, 1993); Jessie Carney Smith, ed., Notable Black American Women (Detroit: Gale Research, 1992); Bruce Kellner, ed., The Harlem Renaissance: A Historical Dictionary for the Era (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1984); Donald Bogle, Brown Sugar: Eighty Years of America’s Black Superstars (New York: Da Capo Press, 1980); Peter Noble, The Negro in Films (NY: Arno Press/New York Times, 1970); Langston Hughes and Milton Meltzer, Black Magic: A Pictorial History of the African-American in the Performing Arts (New York: Da Capo Press, 1967). ↩
See The People’s Voice, February 14, 1942, 12. ↩
Fredi Washington, “PV’s Fredi Records Impressions of ‘A Trying First Experience’,” The People’s Voice, October 31, 1942, 32. ↩
Washington covered for Joe Bostic’s Headlines/Footlights in April 1943. Bostic began Headlines/Footlights in Keen Magazine. I have found no record of Keen Magazine published during the 1940s other than Bostic’s 1943 mention in The People’s Voice. Nell Dodson introduced the column in The People’s Voice in February 1942; Bostic resumed it for the Voice in January 1943. Washington took over the column in May 1943. Nell Dodson, “Headlines and Footlights,” The People’s Voice, February 14, 1942, 30; Joe Bostic, “Headlines/Footlights by Joe Bostic,” The People’s Voice, January 2, 1943, 30; Fredi Washington, “Solid Medlin’ with Marienne Boyd,” The People’s Voice, April 10, 1943, 18; Fredi Washington, “Headlines/Footlights by Joe Bostic,” The People’s Voice, April 10, 1943, 26; Fredi Washington, “Headlines/Footlights by Fredi Washington,” The People’s Voice, May 8, 1943, 24. ↩
“Editorial Policy of The Voice,” The People’s Voice, February 14, 1942, 20. ↩
Max Yergan biographer David Anthony cites an anonymous letter to the members of the New York City Council that asserts that The People’s Voice “was the brain-child of Dr. Max Yergan, an avowed Communist… At first Yergan remained in the background of The People’s Voice. Now he sees no reason to hide his connection. He is boldly listed on the paper’s masthead as treasurer, and no issue of the paper goes to press until he and Powell approve the treatment and handling of every story.” From its inception and throughout publication, the editorial page of The People’s Voice noted that the paper was published weekly by “the Powell-Buchanan Publishing Company, Inc.” From February 14, 1942 to November 7, 1942, Charles Buchanan is cited as the paper’s business manager; from November 14, 1942 to March 20, 1943, he is listed as treasurer; and from April 3, 1943 to September 18, 1943, he is listed as secretary. Yergan is not listed as part of The People’s Voice staff from February 14, 1942 to March 27, 1943. He is listed as the paper’s treasurer from April 3, 1943 to January 11, 1947. His name is absent from January 18, 1947 until January 3, 1948, when the Voice announced, “The Management and Entire Staff of The New People’s Voice,” citing Yergan as president. From January 10, 1948 until the paper’s final edition on April 24, 1948, Yergan is not included in the staff listing. Anthony further explains that from 1945 through 1947, “Yergan played a very important role within the People’s Voice… In a position of power facilitated by his association with Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., he gradually became one of the power brokers behind the popular newspaper.” Yergan also contributed articles to The People’s Voice on numerous occasions. For example, in early 1943, he wrote several articles under the heading “On Africa” or “Max Yergan on Africa and the War,” and in April 1945 he eulogized President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Anthony, Max Yergan, 211, 214; “A Former Associate of Powell,” “Confidential letter to the Members of the City Council,” La Guardia Papers, Box 3316 #203 1943, Mayor’s Committee on Conditions in Harlem: Race Discrimination – Detroit Investigation, Departmental Correspondence Received and Sent Personal Memos, Folder #1A, New York Municipal Archives and Record Collection, New York City cited in Anthony, Max Yergan, 211; The People’s Voice, February 14, 1942 – November 7, 1942; November 14, 1942 – March 20, 1943; April 3, 1943 – September 18, 1943; February 14, 1942 – March 27, 1943; April 3, 1943 – January 11, 1947; January 18, 1947 – January 3, 1948; January 10, 1948 – April 24, 1948. (The editorial staff listing was printed on several different pages throughout the years; it is most often found on page 2, 3, 4, 5, or 16.) Max Yergan, “On Africa,” The People’s Voice, February 13, 1943, 55; Max Yergan, “Max Yergan on Africa and the War,” The People’s Voice, March 13, 1943, 10; March 20, 1943, 10; March 27, 1943, 11; April 3, 1943, 11; April 10, 1943, 11; Max Yergan, “Franklin D. Roosevelt: His Monument and Lessons,” The People’s Voice, April 21, 1945, 16. On Powell, see Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., Adam by Adam: The Autobiography of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (NY: The Dial Press, 1971); Charles Hamilton, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., The Political Biography of an American Dilemma (NY: Atheneum, 1991); Wil Haygood, King of the Cats: The Life and Times of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (Boston and NY: Houghton Mifflin, 1993). ↩
Haygood, King of the Cats, 89. ↩
Fredi Washington, “Solid Meddlin’,” The People’s Voice, April 24, 1943, 18. According to Marvel Cooke, although Washington’s ideas were dazzling, “her [newspaper] copy was miserable.” With Washington’s consent, Cook rewrote her copy “to make it readable.” When a white newspaper offered Washington a position, she retorted, “Well, you’ll have to hire Marvel Cooke, too, because I can’t work without her.” However, in both personal and professional letters, as well as her writing for newsletters and other newspapers, Washington’s prose is clear, compelling, and effective—equally as dazzling as her ideas—which belies her professed dependence upon Cooke. Marvel Cooke, interview by Kathleen Currie, November 1, 1989, Marvel Cooke: Interview #5, transcript (85-114), Washington Press Club Foundation. ↩
Washington, “Solid Meddlin’,” The People’s Voice, May 1, 1943, 18. ↩
A dancer in a show’s chorus line. ↩
Fredi Washington, interview by Jean-Claude Baker, March 29, 1982, transcript, 6.FW1, personal collection of Jean-Claude Baker. ↩
Fredi Washington, interview by Jean-Claude Baker, December 17, 1983, transcript, 1, 11, personal collection of Jean-Claude Baker. ↩
Fredi Washington to Lawrence Brown, October 10, 1933, Kingston, Jamaica, box 1, folder 2, Fredi Washington Papers, 1922-1981 [microform], Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York, NY. ↩
Fredi Washington to Darr Smith, August 2, 1949, box 1, folder 2, Fredi Washington Papers, 1925-1979 [microform], Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York, NY. ↩
Fredi Washington to Langston Hughes, box 1, folder 3069, James Weldon Johnson Collection in the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT. ↩