Fredericka Carolyn[citation needed] "Fredi" Washington (December 23, 1903 – June 28, 1994) was an American stage and film actress, civil rights activist, performer, and writer.

[citation needed] After their mother's death, Washington and her sister Isabel were sent to the St. Elizabeth's Convent School for Colored Girls in Cornwells Heights, near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

[3] She quickly became a popular, featured dancer, and toured internationally with her dancing partner, Al Moiret.

Washington played a young light-skinned Black[1] woman who chose to pass as white to seek more opportunities in a society restricted by legal and social racial segregation.

[3] Moviegoers sometimes assumed from Washington's appearance—her blue-gray eyes, pale complexion, and light brown hair—that she might have passed in her own life.

Claire Trevor plays a reporter who discovers the story and helps both Washington and the white biological mother (Sally Bane) who had given up the baby.

[12][13] According to the Museum of Modern Art in 2013: "The last of the six Claire Trevor 'snappy' vehicles [Allan] Dwan made for Fox in the 1930s tests the limits of free expression on race in Hollywood while sometimes straining credulity.

[16] Directors were also reluctant to cast a light-skinned Black actress in a romantic role with a white leading man; the film production code prohibited suggestions of miscegenation.

[17] As one modern critic explained, Fredi Washington was "...too beautiful and not dark enough to play maids, but rather too light to act in all-Black movies..."[18] Washington had a dramatic role in a 1943 radio tribute to Black women, Heroines in Bronze, produced by the National Urban League,[19] but there were few regular dramatic radio programs in that era with Black protagonists.

"[20] In 1945 she said: "You see I'm a mighty proud gal, and I can't for the life of me find any valid reason why anyone should lie about their origin, or anything else for that matter.

Frankly, I do not ascribe to the stupid theory of white supremacy and to try to hide the fact that I am a Negro for economic or any other reasons.

If I do, I would be agreeing to be a Negro makes me inferior and that I have swallowed whole hog all of the propaganda dished out by our fascist-minded white citizens.

"[21]Washington was a theater writer, and the entertainment editor for The People's Voice (1942–1948), a newspaper for African Americans founded by Adam Clayton Powell Jr., a Baptist minister and politician in New York City.