Series Editors’ Introduction
Carol Stabile and Roopika Risam
Black women working in media industries in the years between the two World Wars are remembered mainly today as performers, when they are remembered at all. But Shirley Graham, Lena Horne, Hazel Scott, Fredi Washington, and others were powerful media critics, who spoke, wrote, and agitated against media industries’ racism, sexism, and xenophobia in the 1930s and 1940s. Women like these also created anti-racist popular culture decades before cultural studies began calling for such interventions into popular culture and long years before the term “intersectionality” was coined. Theirs are the voices that Reanimate seeks to recover.
This reader compiles, for the first time, the work of one of these critics: Fredi Washington (1903-1994). Like other cultural workers of her generation, she was multitalented, excelling as a dancer, actress, writer, and activist. Dr. Laurie Avant Woodard’s introduction this reader offers a close look at Washington’s significance, but a brief summary of her biography is useful here in establishing the context for her contributions as a media critic.
Frederika Carolyn Washington was born on December 23, 1903 in Savannah, Georgia. Her father, Robert T. Washington, was a postal worker and her mother, Harriet Walk Ward Washington, was a homemaker.1 Washington was one of five siblings with two brothers, Bubba and Alonzo, and two sisters, Isabel and Rosebud.2 Her mother died when Washington was eleven. After her father remarried in 1917, Fredi and her sister Isabel were sent to St. Elizabeth’s Convent for orphaned Black and Native children in Cornwell Heights, Pennsylvania. Founded by Katharine Drexel (who also founded Xavier University in New Orleans), St. Elizabeth’s promoted a humanitarian commitment to address “systematic justice issues of inequality, racism, hatred, violence, greed and prejudice in Church and Society.”3 In 1919, Washington moved to New York to live with her grandmother and an aunt, attending Julia Richman High School before the Depression forced her to drop out to support herself. Washington worked as a stockroom clerk at a dress company and as a bookkeeper at the W.C. Handy Black Swan Record Company, where she learned of a dance audition for the musical Shuffle Along in 1921. Washington auditioned for the musical and choreographer Alida Webb hired her as a member of the chorus line on the spot.4 Shuffle Along was the first Broadway musical created, produced, and performed entirely by African Americans. Washington was also among the first African American artists to perform at the St. Regis Hotel in New York.5
Following Shuffle Along, Washington worked as a dancer at Club Alabam, a club in midtown Manhattan that catered to mostly white, affluent audiences. While dancing at Club Alabam, Washington came to the attention of theater producer Lee Schubert, who insisted she audition for Black Boy, a play based on the life of boxer Jack Johnson.6 Washington was cast as the female lead, playing opposite Paul Robeson. The play opened in 1926 at the Comedy Theatre on Broadway, and critics praised her performance.7
Having seen Washington dance in Europe, financier and philanthropist Otto Kahn offered to finance a formal dramatic education for Washington if she agreed to “pass” for French. Unwilling to disavow her Black heritage, Washington turned down Kahn’s offer.8 Washington continued to dance in nightclubs and perform on stage through the 1920s, including two years touring Europe, where she danced as a member of the ballroom dance team Fredi et Moiret with Al Moore.9 Washington began appearing in films in the late 1920s, including Black and Tan (1929), Great Day (1929), and Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1933).
Washington had her most enduring success in Imitation of Life (1934), a box-office success that exacerbated the challenges she faced as a light-skinned Black woman. Washington performed in a number of Broadway productions throughout the 1940s, including a Black-cast production of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata.10 In 1949, Washington agreed to play a maid on The Goldbergs on television, but only if she could read the script first and determine whether it was “the kind of part a Negro actress could play without making Negroes ridiculous.” Washington read the script, revised it, and performed what became a recurring role.11
Washington was politically active throughout her life. Raised Catholic, she left the church in 1935 when Pope Pius XI blessed the flag flying over the Italian troops invading Ethiopia.12 In 1936, Washington co-founded the Negro Actors Guild to represent Black performers who were barred from all-white unions.13 Washington also served as the administrative secretary for the Joint Actors Equity-Theater League Committee on Hotel Accommodations for Negro Actors, fighting to secure hotel accommodations for Black actors. Through her work with the NAACP, she advocated for better representation of Black people in the arts.14 In addition, Washington mentored young Black performers like Sidney Poitier and Lena Horne, providing the funding that allowed a young Horne to return to acting after having children.
In May 1942, frustrated by the racism she confronted as a film actress, Washington sought another outlet for her creative and political energies, joining the staff of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.’s Harlem newspaper, The People’s Voice, where she worked on public relations for the weekly newspaper and began covering for columnists on vacation. In April 1943, she took over the paper’s drama and theater columns—Headlines/Footlights—and shortly thereafter graduated to editing the entertainment section for the paper and writing the Fredi Says column under her own byline.15
Washington’s new career at The People’s Voice coincided with the launch of the “Double V” campaign by the Pittsburgh Courier. The Double V campaign was inspired by a letter to the editor of the Courier, in which cafeteria worker James Thompson called for Black people to embrace a “Double V” campaign for “a double victory in a two-front war. The first V represented victory over the enemies abroad; the second V stood for victory over the enemies from within,” or white supremacy in the U.S.16 Washington fiercely embraced the Double V campaign, using her columns to criticize the treatment of Black soldiers. In one notable article, she printed a letter from a “white soldier” who exposed the realities of life in a segregated military and lobbied the U.S. State Department to allow Black artists to entertain troops overseas.
The People’s Voice gave Washington free rein over what she covered for the paper and her feature writing and columns contain important criticisms of media’s racism and sexism, as well as coverage of progressive media work that challenged stereotypes and pointed in the direction of social change. In 1943, for example, Washington wrote about Margaret Webster’s groundbreaking production of Shakespeare’s Othello, featuring Paul Robeson as Othello, Jose Ferrer as Iago, and Uta Hagen as Desdemona. “Othello,” Washington wrote in her feature piece about the play, “has been interpreted through the centuries mostly by white men,” reminding her readers that “Ira Aldrich, the American Negro Shakespeare actor, played the role in the middle Nineteenth Century in the great cities of Europe, but never in this country.” Washington commended Uta Hagen as a “rabid anti-fascist [who] feels it an honor and privilege to play opposite Mr. Robeson, thereby striking at the heart of the racial myth.”17 Washington concluded the article with a call to action that was swiftly becoming a trademark of her journalistic writing. The play, she wrote, “is a chalk-up for democracy and a blow to fascism, limited though it be to reach into those parts of the country which need it most. But who knows. Maybe the time is not too far distant when the dynasties of the far-reaching picture world will become adult enough to shoulder their full democratic responsibilities to the extent of filming Othello with an authentic black Moor and a lily-white Desdemona . . . for all the small-minded unjust elements of our country, scattered throughout like wind-blown seeds, to see, digest, and become enriched thereby.”18
Washington used her journalistic writings to launch forceful criticisms of Hollywood stereotypes. When the NAACP organized a campaign against racist stereotypes in Walt Disney’s 1946 The Song of the South, actress Hattie McDaniels, who played a mammy role in the film, wrote a letter to columnist Hedda Hopper defending the film. Decrying the mammy roles that McDaniels was forced to play, as well as what she understood to be McDaniels’ complicity with those stereotypes, Washington contended that “movie-goers who have no contact with Negroes have no other means of finding out that off the screen she and countless other Negro females live an entirely different kind of life.”19 “Wake up Hattie,” Washington wrote, “no one is riding you for the mammy roles you must play, but I for one am riding you for your defense of the overall picture these roles create in the minds of the movie going public.” Washington ended her criticism with another call to action, telling readers to join the Cultural Division of the National Negro Congress, an organization she was helping to organize that intended to “get better roles” for Black actors, “depicting us as part of the day to day American scene.”20
Between 1943 and 1948, Washington wrote over 300 articles for The People’s Voice, work constituting a significant body of hitherto unpublished media criticism. The intent of this volume is to bring these works together for the first time to allow students and scholars the opportunity to review and analyze the work of this important intellectual and to restore to critical view a body of work that has long been suppressed.
Kimberly N. Davis, “Fredi Washington: Black Entertainers and the ‘Double V’ Campaign.” Master’s thesis, Texas State University-San Marcos, 2006. ↩
Norma Jean Darden, “Oh, Sister! Fredi and Isabel Washington Relive ’30s Razzmatazz,” Essence Magazine, September 1978. ↩
Davis, "Fredi Washington," 4. ↩
Darden, "Oh, Sister." ↩
Cheryl Black, “Looking White, Acting Black: Cast(e)Ing Fredi Washington,” Theatre Survey 45.1 (2004): 19–40, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0040557404000031. ↩
Black, "Looking White, Acting Black." ↩
Black, "Looking White, Acting Black." ↩
Veronica Chambers, “The Tragic Mulatto,” New York Times, January 1, 1995, sec. Magazine. ↩
Darden, "Oh, Sister." ↩
Earl Conrad, “Lysistrata Dance Sensation,” New York Times, October 26, 1946, sec. National. ↩
Arthur Pollock, “Fredi Washington Refuses to Be Anyone But Fredi,” The Daily Compass, December 14, 1949. ↩
Darden, "Oh, Sister." ↩
Darden, "Oh, Sister." ↩
Darden, "Oh, Sister." ↩
“Our Four Star Washington Gal,” The People’s Voice, August 14, 1943. ↩
Davis, "Fredi Washington," 35. ↩
Fredi Washington, “First Nighters Forget Social Taboos as Bard’s ‘Othello’ Comes to Life,” The People’s Voice, October 23, 1943. ↩
Washington, "First Nighters." ↩
Fredi Washington, "Fredi Says," The People's Voice, April 26, 1947, 22. ↩
Washington, "Fredi Says," 22. ↩