Washington, Fredi, 1903-

Born in Savannah, Georgia in December 1903, the third of nine children, Fredericka (“Fredi”) Washington came to New York at the age of 16, in 1919. She started her career in show business in 1921 as a chorus girl at the Alabam Club, and later won a spot in the landmark play Shuffle Along. In 1926, she obtained an acting role in the play Black Boy, starring Paul Robeson, and at the closing of that show sailed to Europe with Al Moiret as part of a dance act called Fredi and Moiret. Upon her return to the U.S. in 1928, her career accelerated and she appeared in three movies: Black and Tan Fantasy, a short feature with Duke Ellington (1930); Emperor Jones with Paul Robeson (1933); Drum in the Night (1933); and an equal number of plays, Singing the Blues (1930), Sweet Chariot (1930) and Run Lil' Chillun (1933), within a five year span.

During this period, Ms Washington married Lawrence Brown, a trombonist in Duke Ellington's band (July 1933). The marriage ended in divorce fifteen years later. Her career, meanwhile, took a leap with her highly successful role in the two movies Imitation of Life (1934) and One Mile from Heaven with Bill Robinson (1937), and the play Mamba's Daughter with Ethel Waters and Georgette Harvey (1939). She also played a leading role in an all-black production of Lysistrata on Broadway in 1946.

In the 1930's, Ms Washington actively participated in the boycott campaigns and the picket lines organized on 125th Street by her brother-in-law, the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Jr. (who had married her sister Isabel), to force Harlem stores, utility companies and bus lines to hire blacks. In 1938, she was a co-founder and subsequently Executive Director of the Negro Actors Guild, an organization which included among its officers Duke Ellington, Louis Amstrong, Ethel Waters, Paul Robeson and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Ms Washington also wrote a regular feature Headlines and Footlights (1944) and Fredi Speaks for The People's Voice, a weekly paper founded by Adam Clayton Powell Jr. in 1938. In the 1940's and `50' s, she actively participated in the Cultural Division of the National Negro Congress and the Committee for the Negro in the Arts, two organizations dedicated to the equality of opportunity for black artists and the eradication of racial stereotypes in all forms of American culture.

Ms Washington remarried in 1952 to Anthony Bell, a Connecticut dentist. She worked at the Stanford branch of Bloomingdale's from 1954 to 1980.

From the guide to the Fredi Washington papers, [microform], 1922-1981, 1922-1941, (The New York Public Library. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division.)