Фреди Вашингтон: Актриса, активистка и звезда Гарлемского Ренессанса.

American actress (1903–1994)

Fredericka Carolyn "Fredi" Washington (December 23, 1903 – June 28, 1994) was an American stage and film actress, civil rights activist, performer, and writer. Washington was of African American descent. She was one of the first Black Americans to gain recognition for film and stage work in the 1920s and 1930s. Washington was active in the Harlem Renaissance (1920s–1930s), her best known role being Peola in the 1934 film version of Imitation of Life, where she plays a young light skinned Black woman who decides to pass as white. Her last film role was in One Mile from Heaven (1937), after which she left Hollywood and returned to New York to work in theatre and civil rights activism.

Fredi Washington was born in 1903 in Savannah, Georgia, to Robert T. Washington, a postal worker, and Harriet "Hattie" Walker Ward, a dancer. Both were of African American and European ancestry. Washington was the second of their five children. Her mother died when Fredi was 11 years old. As the oldest girl in her family, she helped raise her younger siblings, Isabel, Rosebud, and Robert, with the help of their grandmother. After their mother's death, Fredi and her sister Isabel were sent to the St. Elizabeth's Convent School for Colored Girls in Cornwells Heights, near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her father eventually remarried and his second wife died while pregnant with the couple's first child. He married a third time and had four additional children, giving the family a total of nine children. While still in school in Philadelphia, Washington's family moved north to Harlem, New York. Washington graduated from Julia Richman High School in New York City.

Washington's entertainment career began in 1921 as a chorus girl in the Broadway musical Shuffle Along. She was hired by dancer Josephine Baker as a member of the "Happy Honeysuckles," a cabaret group. Washington's collaboration with Baker led to her being discovered by producer Lee Shubert. In 1926, she was recommended for a co starring role on the Broadway stage with Paul Robeson in the play Black Boy.

Her best known role was in the 1934 movie Imitation of Life. Washington played a young light skinned Black Imitation of Life was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture, but it did not win. Years later, in 2007, Time magazine ranked it as among "The 25 Most Important Films on Race."

Washington's experiences in the film industry and theater led her to become a civil rights activist. In an effort to help other Black actors and actresses find more opportunities, in 1937 Washington co founded the Negro Actors Guild of America (NAG), with Noble Sissle, W. C. Handy, Paul Robeson, and Ethel Waters. While working with the NAACP, Fredi fought for more representation and better treatment of Black actors in Hollywood because she was one of the few Black actors in Hollywood who had some influence with white studio executives. Aside from working with those organizations to fight for the rights of Black actors, Washington also advocated for the federal protection of Black Americans and was a lobbyist for the Dyer Anti Lynching Bill, which the NAACP supported.

Washington played opposite Bill Robinson in Fox's One Mile from Heaven (1937), in which she played a light skinned woman claiming to be the mother of a "white" baby. Claire Trevor plays a reporter who discovers the story and helps both Washington and the white biological mother who had given up the baby, played by Sally Blane. According to the Museum of Modern Art in 2013: "The last of the six Claire Trevor 'snappy' vehicles [Allan] Dwan made for Fox in the 1930s tests the limits of free expression on race in Hollywood while sometimes straining credulity." Washington appeared in the 1939 Broadway production of Mamba's Daughters, along with Ethel Waters and Georgette Harvey. She later became a casting consultant for the stage productions of Carmen Jones (1943) and George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess.

Washington was a theater writer, and the entertainment editor for The People's Voice (1942–1948), a newspaper for African Americans founded by Adam Clayton Powell Jr., a Baptist minister and politician in New York City who was married to her sister Isabel Washington Powell. She was outspoken about racism faced by African Americans and worked closely with Walter White, then president of the NAACP, to address pressing issues facing Black people in America.

In 1933, Washington married Lawrence Brown, the trombonist in Duke Ellington's jazz orchestra. That marriage ended in divorce. She was a devout Catholic.