Fredi Washington

Fredericka Carolyn Fredi Washington was an accomplished AfricanAmerican dramatic film actress, one of the first to gain recognition for her work in film and on stage. She was active during the period known as the Harlem Renaissance . She is best known for her role as Peola in the 1934 version of the film Imitation of Life, in which she plays a young lightskinned black woman who decides to pass as white. Her last film role was in One Mile from Heaven , after which she left Hollywood and returned to New York to work in theatre and civil rights.

Fredi Washington was born in 1903 in Savannah, Georgia to Robert T. Washington, a postal worker, and Harriet Walker Ward, a former dancer. Both were of AfricanAmerican and European ancestry. Fredi was the second of their five children. Her mother, Hattie, died when Fredi was eleven years old. As the oldest girl in her family, Fredi helped raise her younger siblings, Isabel, Rosebud and Robert, with the help of their grandmother, whom the family called Big Mama. After their mothers death, Fredi was sent to the St. Elizabeths Convent School for colored girls in Cornwells Heights, near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her sister, Isabel, soon followed her. At some point her father, Robert T. Washington, remarried. His second wife died while pregnant. He later married a third time and had four children with his last wife. Fredi had a total of eight siblings from her fathers two families.

Source: Wikipedia