Mixed Race Studies

“A Free America for All Peoples …”: Fredi Washington, the Negro Actors Guild, and the Voice of the People

The Journal of African American History
Volume 105, Number 3 (Summer 2020)
DOI: 10.1086/709201

Laurie A. Woodard, Assistant Professor of History
The City College of New York, New York, New York

Focusing on the work of New Negro performing artist Fredi Washington as a writer and activist during the 1930s and 1940s, this article places an African American female performing artist at the center of the narrative of the New Negro Renaissance, illuminates the vital influence of Black female performing artists on the movement, and demonstrates the ways in which Washington and the New Negro Renaissance are central components of the social transformation of twentieth-century America. Washington’s fusion of artistry and activism, her determination to fight oppression on myriad fronts and in myriad forms, casts her as an influential actor in the unremitting African American quest for civil and human rights. Her life and her work make visible the significance of the performing arts within the movement and enhance our understanding of the scope and texture of the activism of Black performing artists and of Black women. Her experience brings the Renaissance into the progressive movements of the early twentieth century and illuminates its role as a keystone in the foundation of the Black Freedom Movement.

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Review: Identity in Passing: RACE-ING and E-RACE-ING in American and African American History

The Journal of African American History
Volume 101, No. 3, Summer 2016
pages 344-355
DOI: 10.5323/jafriamerhist.101.3.0344

Thomas J. Davis, Professor of History
Arizona State University, Tempe

• Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Clearly Invisible: Racial Passing and the Color of Cultural Identity. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2012. Pp. 269. Cloth $49.95.
• Baz Dreisinger, Near Black: White to Black Passing in American Culture. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008. Pp. 196. Paper $26.95.
• Mary Frances Berry, “We Are Who We Say We Are”: A Black Family’s Search for Home Across the Atlantic World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. 206. Paper $19.95.

Passing is a long-standing theme in American and African American history.¹ Indeed, because identity has been an ever-present element in history, passing has been an ever-present element in history generally. Distinguishing between and among groups and categorizing individual members has again and again prompted questions about who is who, about what exactly distinguishes one from another, and about who belongs where. But passing is about more than contested and oft-disputed categories. When it reaches to lived-experience, passing is about self and society, about individual image and imagining, about self-image and self-imagining, about social image and social change. Passing is about the scope, source, substance, and control of individual identity.

Despite its centrality, identity appears in historical narratives typically as a given, or at least as taken for granted. Except for persons cast as “others,” group labels conveniently cover flawed lines of distinction. Our focus concentrates on identity only when it becomes contested, when uncertainty or ambiguity raise doubts; when identity becomes an issue of power, when such questions as “who…

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