The Fair-Skinned Black Actress Who Refused to 'Pass' in 1930s Hollywood

The Fair-Skinned Black Actress Who Refused to 'Pass' in 1930s Hollywood

Fredi Washington embraced her race at the height of Jim Crow.
By ERIN BLAKEMORE

When Duke Ellington and his band toured the segregated South in the early 1930s, they encountered racism wherever they went. A gorgeous Black performer also traveled with the band—Frederika “Fredi” Washington. Lithe and light-skinned, she was pale enough to “pass” as white in the color-obsessed South, and during the tour she took advantage of her skin color to slip into whites-only ice cream parlors and buy ice cream for the entire band.

Washington may have used her skin color to procure cool treats on the road, but she refused to use it for economic or social gain. During a time of harsh segregation and overwhelming bias against African Americans, she embraced her heritage. And while other actresses of Hollywood’s Golden Age like Merle Oberon (who was Anglo-Indian) and Rita Hayworth (who was Spanish-American) hid their features as the price of admission to white Hollywood, Washington refused to hide behind her light skin.

Born in Savannah, Georgia, Washington moved to Harlem along with her family during the Great Migration, when Black families fled the Jim Crow South in search of new opportunities in Northern cities. The daughter of a postal worker and a dancer, Washington had green eyes and light skin that belied the era’s common expectations of what an African-American “looked like.”

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