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Mar 5 • 14 tweets • 5 min read
Before there was Lena Horne, there was Savannah’s own Fredi Washington. She was one of the first African-American actresses to gain recognition in films and challenge racism in Hollywood. A proud Black woman, she refused to pass for white. Actors Louise Beavers, left, and Fredi Washington, right, in
Born in 1903, Frederika “Fredi” Washington excelled as a dancer, actress, journalist, and Civil Rights activist. She began her career as a dancer in the 1920s in “Shuffe Along,” the first Broadway show created, produced, and performed by African Americans.
It was a landmark in African-American musical theater, credited with inspiring the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and '30s. Washington became lifelong friend with another dancer named Josephine Baker. Playbill for Shuffle Along
The famed producer Lee Shubert saw Washington perform and recommended her for a dramatic co-starring role opposite Paul Robeson in the Broadway play “Black Boy” (1926). She and Robeson were rumored to have had a years long romantic relationship. #chemistry Paul Robeson and Fredi Washington
At the end of the run Washington turned to dancing again and toured the capitals and entertainment centers of Europe in 1927-28 with her dance partner Al Moiret. (Think Fred & Ginger but Black.)
In London they mixed with royalty and Washington taught a 1920s dance craze, the Black Bottom, to the Prince of Wales. The dance from New Orleans overtook the Charleston in popularity during the Jazz Age. (Fredi was the OG Black girl magic.) Fredi Washington
After her return to New York, she appeared in several Broadway stage productions, including “Singin' the Blues” (1931) with her sister Isabel “Belle” Powell, and Hall Johnson's folk drama “Run, Little Chillun” (1933).
Washington appeared in short films like “Black and Tan” with Duke Ellington and his orchestra. She played the part of Undine in the 1933 film “Emperor Jones” opposite her friend Paul Robeson.
But she is most known for playing Peola in “Imitation of Life” in 1934. Peola, a light-skinned young African American woman, chooses to reject her dark-skinned mother so she can pass as white in order to escape racial discrimination.
Like Peola, Washington experienced limited opportunities because of her race, but unlike Peola, she never denied her African-American heritage. Her appearance in Imitation of Life exacerbated difficulties she faced as a light-skinned black woman.
Washington’s face had to be darkened in Imitation of Life (as it had in The Emperor Jones in 1933) so that audiences would not read her as white. Her performance in the role led to publicity claiming that she was, in real life, anti-black.
Following the film’s release, Washington began to take a public stance against racial passing, a stance that influenced her subsequent selection of roles and her devotion to political action.
She went on to help found the Negro Actors Guild in 1937 & served as Entertainment Editor of the People’s Voice, established in 1942. She used this platform to do everything from support the Double V Campaign during WWII to call for an end to racist & sexist tropes in Hollywood. A newspaper column written by Fredi Washington
Happy O’oman’s History Month! Sources:

broadcast41.uoregon.edu/biography/wash…

independent.co.uk/news/people/ob…

arogundade.com/actress-fredi-…

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Bot…

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuffle_A…

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More from @GullahSc

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Mar 2
Every morning, Ruby Middleton Forsythe would stand outside Holy Cross-Faith Memorial Episcopal School and ring an old fashion brass hand bell to summon her students to the one-room schoolhouse on Pawleys Island, SC. It was the only one available to Black children during Jim Crow. A photo of Miss Ruby with s...
No one called it by the fancy name. Everyone called it Miss Ruby’s School—from the president of the United States to the television networks that did stories about her to the families whose children she taught for more than a half century despite harassment from the Ku Klux Klan.
She and other African-American teachers countered white supremacist messages of Black inferiority while working in overcrowded classrooms and within an oppressive Jim Crow system. They provided part of the foundation for a modern Civil Rights Movement.
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Feb 28
For a generation of Americans, Ron & Natalie Daise’s “Gullah Gullah Island” introduced them to the Gullah Geechee people & Gullah culture. The multi-award winning children’s show (1994-1998) was unlike any series Nickelodeon—or any other American network—had ever produced. Cast of Gullah Gullah Island
A generation of children learned “Africanisms” through the program. An Africanism is basically anything the descendants of the enslaved did and continue to do that is African in origin. This word was coined by the venerable Lorenzo Dow Turner, PhD, the “Father of Gullah Studies.”
The Gullah Geechee people have preserved more of their African cultural history than any other large group of Black people in the U.S., noted William S. Pollitzer, professor emeritus of anatomy and anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in a 1999 book.
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GullahMuseumSC Profile picture
Feb 26
Enslaved Africans and their descendants—sometimes alone, sometimes with others—fled from forced labor, harsh punishment, torture, abuse, and the threat of family separation to create small, secret encampments in the Americas. Europeans called these freedom seekers “maroons.” Leonard Parkinson was the leader of the Maroons in Trelawny
Maroon activities and uprisings were the most militant form of resistance to slavery. The history of maroons in the Caribbean and Latin America has been well documented. Yet, historians have paid little attention to their history in the U.S.
In South Carolina, Florida, Louisiana, and Virginia, these swamp maroon communities struggled to maintain an alternative to slavery in profoundly challenging environmental conditions—and the constant threat of enslavement.
Read 18 tweets
GullahMuseumSC Profile picture
Feb 26
The Long Bay Symphony will present a special From Gullah to Gospel program highlighting Gullah Geechee music and its subsequent influence on African American musical genres, such as spirituals, ragtime, Dixieland jazz styles, and gospel. longbaysymphony.com/event/gullah-t… Flyer for From Gullah to Gospel event.
Joining the Long Bay Symphony on this musical journey through time and tradition will be renowned Gullah Geechee historians, storytellers, and singers Ron and Natalie Daise.
The orchestra will feature music by Scott Joplin, William Grant Still, Duke Ellington and others, and a mass choir from Sandy Grove Baptist, Mount Olive African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.), and the First Presbyterian Church.
Read 4 tweets
GullahMuseumSC Profile picture
Feb 23
The Gullah Geechee song “Kumbaya” is a plea to God for help. You may know it as “Kum Ba Yah,” “Come By Yuh,” or “Come By Here.” Once one of the most popular songs in the folk revival of the 20th century, it has more recently become the subject of misplaced scorn. Title: "Campmeeting" from the Lowcountry Gullah se
In its heyday, from the 1950s through the 1990s, the song was recorded by a who’s who of folk singers from around the world, from Bob Dylan, Odetta, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, the Seekers.
This is the first known recording of the song "Kumbaya" being sung in Gullah or as it was known then “Sea Islands Creole Dialect” by a Gullah Geechee man identified only as H. Wylie. loc.gov/item/ihas.2001…
Read 5 tweets
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Feb 17
Gullah Geechees created the dance The Charleston—the world famous song came later. But where did a guy from New Jersey get the idea, and how did the dance become a worldwide craze in the 1920s? ccpl.org/charleston-tim… Josephine Baker doing the dance The Charleston
It all comes back to the boys of Charleston’s Jenkins Orphanage Band and the Great Migration, according to this great article by the Charleston County Public Library. jenkinsinstitute.org/index.php/our-… the boys of Charleston’s Jenkins Orphanage
The Jenkins Orphanage was established in 1891 by Rev. Daniel J. Jenkins after finding four homeless boys huddled up. Once established, it became the first private institute of its kind. Within four years the orphanage housed 500 children.
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