Color Politics, Passing, and dem White folks!

actress Fredi Washington, remembered for her compelling role in the 1934 film, Imitation of Life.

The Complexities of Passing for White ● "Though Washington was cast as a mixed race character more than once, she identified strongly as a black woman, and was outspoken in renouncing racism." 

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"When African American actress Fredi Washington played a black girl passing for white in the 1934 film Imitation of Life, she was accused by critics of denying her own heritage. In fact, Washington never hid her roots, and went on to become an activist for African Americans in the performing arts. As she later told Hue magazine, “I’m honest and…you don’t have to be white to be good.”

The young, black starlet posed a challenge for a Hollywood used to seeing in black and white. Washington was so light-skinned that she reportedly had to wear makeup to play black characters. According to Washington’s friend Jean-Claude Baker, a restaurateur and author, many who saw her thought she was white and she was able to frequent whites-only establishments all her life without problems. “She did pass for white when she was traveling in the South with Duke Ellington,” Baker is quoted as saying in Washington’s New York Times 1994 obituary. “They could not go into ice-cream parlors, so she would go in and buy the ice cream, then go outside and give it to Ellington and the band. Whites screamed at her, ‘Nigger lover!’”

At the height of her career, Washington was cast as a number of mixed-race characters. Even though she was representing a reality as American as apple pie, Washington was also bringing to the fore the gnarled predicament of race and the many shadows it casts on everyday life...

Fredericka Carolyn Washington was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1903, the second of five children...[The family] moved north as part of the Great Migration, settling in Harlem, a place teeming with culture that would come to be known as the pounding heart of black America.

Washington was a dancer before she became an actress. Her first role was as a chorus girl alongside Josephine Baker in Shuffle Along, a popular 1921 Broadway revue..."

https://timeline.com/the-complexities-of-passing-for-white-4c8cf23c3754 

Fredi Washington, actress born December 23, 1903.