From Blackface to Black Power: Fredi Washington, the New Negro Renaissance, and the Quest for Black Freedom

“I am an American citizen and by God, we all have inalienable rights and wherever those rights are tampered with… I fight… No matter how white I look, on the inside I feel black… To prove I don't buy white superiority, I chose to be a Negro."

--Fredi Washington, 1945

Focusing on performing artist and civil rights activist Fredi Washington, this paper explores the relationship between the New Negro Renaissance and the Black Freedom Movement. Having begun her professional life as a dancer in the 1921 all-black musical Shuffle Along, Washington embraced the artistic genres of dance, theatre, and film to sustain a thirty-year career as a performing artist. As she grew and matured as an artist and as an individual, she expanded her social and political consciousness and activities to include more easily legible orms of activism, such as writing for Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.’s progressive newspaper the People’s Voice. As an artist/activist, Washington was a politically astute, radical, and vital voice for the realization for African Americans of the promises of American democracy that were arrested by slavery, Jim Crow segregation, racial discrimination and terrorism. Equating civil and human rights and condemning white supremacy and “homegrown systems of fascism and tyranny,” Washington exemplified her own belief that black artists were central to the performing arts and central to the nation, and that black artists had a responsibility to themselves, to each other, the black community, and the larger world. Her work reflected and pushed forward the transformation of African Americans from the blackface objects of the white supremacist imagination to proud and beautiful Black Americans. Her experience situates her firmly within the New Negro Renaissance, casts her as a vital actor in the Black Freedom Movement, and illuminates threads that weave these seemingly discreet movements together.