She Refused
to Disappear.

In 1910 a little girl named Fredericke Washington lived at 520 East Gaston Street. Her father Robert was a postal worker. She was six years old. The census enumerator wrote her name in the household record and moved on to the next house. Nobody wrote down what she would become.

Fredi Washington grew up on Gaston Street in Savannah and left for New York City. She became one of the most important actresses of the pre-Code Hollywood era — the brief window between 1929 and 1934 when American films were allowed to be honest about race, desire, and power before the censors shut it down.

She was extraordinarily beautiful. She was also light-skinned enough to pass for white. Hollywood told her to do exactly that — to pass, to pretend, to leave her identity behind. She refused.

At a time when Black actresses were expected to play maids Fredi Washington played leading roles. When studios pressured her to pass as white she turned them down. She co-founded the Negro Actors Guild to fight for the rights of Black performers in an industry that did not want to acknowledge they existed.

Her most famous role was in the 1934 film Imitation of Life — where she played a light-skinned Black woman who passes for white and destroys herself in the process. She was showing the country what it cost a person to deny who they were.

Note: The FamilySearch index incorrectly recorded the address as 13 West Gaston. The census image was pulled and house number 520 was read directly from the enumerator's handwriting. The index is a finding aid. The image is the truth.