Mixed Race Studies

‘Fredi’ Washington: Savannah’s Civil Rights Starlet

Freeman’s Rag
2018-06-16

Michael Freeman
Savannah, Georgia

Fredi Washington

Savannah has been home to many celebrities. Whether it be Academy Award winner Charles Coburn, Stacey Keach of Mike Hammer fame, Johnny Mercer, the Lady Chablis, or Paula Dean, Savannah has never been without a dash of the famous. But Fredricka Washington (Fredi) was probably the celebrity known most for her groundbreaking ways. She was born in 1903 here in Savannah. She lived here until she was thirteen when her mother died. At that time she was sent to live with her grandmother in Pennsylvania.

At the age of 16 she went to New York where she was discovered by Josephine Baker. Baker hired Fredi for a cabaret show called the Happy Honeysuckles. Fredi was a talented entertainer and quickly created a dancing career. She danced with her partner Al Moiret throughout the world. Her film career did not start until she was in her thirties. In 1926, Washington was recommended for a co-starring role on the Broadway stage with Paul Robeson in Black Boy. This was a big break in her acting career. In 1934 she appeared in the film ‘Imitation of Life’. She played the part of a black woman who passed for white. The film would earn an Academy Award Nomination for best picture. Time magazine would rank the film one of “The 25 Most Important Films on Race”. Because of her light colored skin many people thought she would actually want to ‘pass’ and was ashamed of her black heritage. In 1945 in response to a question on the subject 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.”…

Read the entire article here.

“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.

Read or purchase the article here.

2022 CMRS Conference Is Two Weeks Away!

Critical Mixed Race Studies Association
2022-01-24

*** View the program schedule here! ***

REGISTER NOW!
It is not too late to register for the 6th biennial Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference titled Ancestral Futurisms: Embodying Multiracialities Past, Present, and Future to be held virtually February 24-26, 2022. To register, click here.

BECOME AN EXHIBITOR
For a small $10 fee you can advertise your business and/or sell your wares during the CMRS Conference in our virtual exhibitor space. Register here.

BECOME A CONFERENCE SPONSOR
It’s not too late to become a 2022 CMRS conference sponsor. Sponsors receive advertisement on the conference website, free registration for students or community members, and conference merchandise featuring the brilliant art image “Transition” by artivist Favianna Rodriguez.

To become a sponsor please go to our Eventbrite page here.

NEW! View the program guide here.

Preparing for Higher Education’s Mixed Race Future: Why Multiraciality Matters

Palgrave Macmillan
2022-02-09
237 pages
5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)
Hardcover ISBN: 9783030888206
eBook ISBN: ISBN: 978-3-030-88821-3

Edited by:

Marc P. Johnston-Guerrero, Associate Chair of the Department of Educational Studies; Associate Professor in the Higher Education and Student Affairs
Ohio State University

Lisa Delacruz Combs, Ph.D. Candidate
The Ohio State University

Victoria K. Malaney-Brown, Director of Academic Integrity
Columbia University

• Traces a multiracial trajectory to and through higher education – from pre-college adolescents to post-tenure faculty
• Complicates common constructs within higher education by examining them through a mixed race lens
• Critically advances multiraciality in alignment with larger anti-racist and social justice efforts

Increasing attention and representation of multiraciality in both the scholarly literature and popular culture warrants further nuancing of what is understood about multiracial people, particularly in the changing contexts of higher education. This book offers a way of Preparing Higher Education for its Mixed Race Future by examining Why Multiraciality Matters. In preparation, the book highlights recent contributions in scholarship – both empirical studies and scholarly syntheses – on multiracial students, staff, and faculty/scholars across three separate yet interrelated parts, which will help spur the continued evolution of multiraciality into the future.

Table of Contents

• Section I: Foundations of Multiracial Difference
  • Chapter 1. Coming of Age: Why Multiracial Adolescence Matters for Higher Education
  • Chapter 2. College Enrollment and Multiracial Backgrounds: An Exploration of Access and Choice
  • Chapter 3. Operationalizing Multiracial Consciousness: Disrupting Monoracism at a Historically White Institution
• Section II: Complex Identities Nuancing Multiraciality
  • Chapter 4. The “Hot Ho” and the Unwanted, Colored Male: Gendered Multiracial Subjectivities Hailed through Contemporary Racial Discourse
  • Chapter 5. In Pursuit of a Leadership Identity: Exploring the Role of Involvement in Cultivating a Multiracial Identity at a Hispanic Serving Institution
  • Chapter 6. The Complexity of Black Biracial Identity within the Contexts of Peer and Student Service Interactions at a Predominately White Institution
  • Chapter 7. I am Black and …: Complexities of Being a Marginalized Multiracial Higher Education Professional in Times of Heightened Racial Tensions
  • Chapter 8. Are We Enough? Exploring Multiracial Staff Identities through the Narratives of Mixed Filipinx Americans
• Section III: Nuancing Multiracial Engagement and Outcomes
  • Chapter 9. Sense of Belonging for Multiracial and Multiethnic College Students
  • Chapter 10. “Campus Feels Different to Me”: Comparing Climate Experiences of White vs. Non-White Multiracial College Students
  • Chapter 11. Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t: The Trials and Tribulations of Multiracial Student Activism
  • Chapter 12. Pedestaled or Pigeonholed? Multiracial Scholars Traversing Monoracial Academia
  • Chapter 13. Conclusion: What Difference Does Multiraciality Make? Reflections and Future Directions

He risked his life to become a founding father of civil rights. Why was he forgotten?

The Los Angeles Times
2022-02-09

Stuart Miller

Mention Walter White and it will likely conjure an image of Bryan Cranston from “Breaking Bad,” playing the man who snarled, “I am the danger.”

But there’s a real-life Walter White who deserves to be a household name — a Black man who faced unfathomable danger in pursuit of truth and justice as he did battle with the American way. White should rank alongside Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X as a founding father of the civil rights era. Yet he is all but forgotten today.

That oversight gets an overdue correction in A.J. Baime’s engrossing new biography, “White Lies: The Double Life of Walter F. White and America’s Darkest Secret.”…

Read the entire article here.

A Man Called White and Exploring America’s Darkest Secret in “White Lies”

Chicago Review of Books
2022-02-07

Steve Nathans-Kelly

An interview with A.J. Baime about his new book, “White Lies: The Double Life of Walter F. White and America’s Darkest Secret.”

When we speak of the peak years of the Civil Rights Movement, typically we refer to the period beginning with Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56—which thrusted Martin Luther King, Jr. onto the national stage. This canonical era concludes with the passage of the Voting Rights Act in August 1965 following the pivotal showdown in Selma. Those eleven years formed the Movement’s dominant narrative, which blurred and obscured most of what came before and after (and oversimplified much that’s in between).

Jacquelyn Dowd Hall’s landmark 2005 essay, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Uses of the Past,” ushered in a critical reassessment of these artificial historical boundaries. Hall argued that anointing this era not only limited the movement’s lifespan to a “halcyon decade,” but also narrowed its goals to the pursuit of a vaguely defined “color-blind” society, a notion later used to recast King and others as proponents of neoliberal social and fiscal policy.

Focusing exclusively on this period also meant overlooking many of the foundational figures who preceded it and laid the groundwork for nearly everything that followed.

One such figure is Walter F. White—known in his lifetime as “Mr. NAACP”—who led America’s most powerful civil rights organization from 1929 until his death in 1955. White featured prominently in nearly every important battle against segregation and white supremacy during those years. White’s extraordinary life demonstrates how blinding white Americans’ appalling lack of color-blindness could be.

By all appearances, the blond-haired and blue-eyed Walter White was white. But like his multiracial parents, both born to formerly enslaved people, White identified as Black throughout his life. In his early years with the NAACP, he used his appearance to infiltrate Southern white communities as an undercover white man, gathering critical information on brutal lynchings from killers keen to brag about their crimes…

Read the entire interview here.

White Lies: The Double Life of Walter F. White and America’s Darkest Secret

Mariner Books
2022-02-08
400 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0358447757
Paperback ISBN: 978-0358581772
eBook ISBN: 9780358439660
Audiobook ISBN: 9780358581932

A. J. Baime

A riveting biography of Walter F. White, a little-known Black civil rights leader who passed for white in order to investigate racist murders, help put the NAACP on the map, and change the racial identity of America forever

Walter F. White led two lives: one as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance and the NAACP in the early twentieth century; the other as a white newspaperman who covered lynching crimes in the Deep South at the blazing height of racial violence. Born mixed race and with very fair skin and straight hair, White was able to “pass” for white. He leveraged this ambiguity as a reporter, bringing to light the darkest crimes in America and helping to plant the seeds of the civil rights movement. White’s risky career led him to lead a double life. He was simultaneously a second-class citizen subject to Jim Crow laws at home and a widely respected professional with full access to the white world at work. His life was fraught with internal and external conflict—much like the story of race in America. Starting out as an obscure activist, White ultimately became Black America’s most prominent leader. A character study of White’s life and career with all these complexities has never been rendered, until now.

By the award-winning, best-selling author of The Accidental President, Dewey Defeats Truman, and The Arsenal of Democracy, White Lies uncovers the life of a civil rights leader unlike any other.

Existing Across Boundaries: A Conversation with Community Journalist and Editor Sharon Ho Chang

The Seventh Wave
2021-10-15

Sharon Ho Chang knows her way around community journalism. She is the managing editor at the South Seattle Emerald, a digital news and culture publication run by and centering the BIPOC people and communities who live, work, create, and are experiencing displacement due to gentrification in the city’s Central District and South End. The Emerald is a beacon of thorough, complex, and vital reporting for the immediate area, as well as an example of how journalism can embrace multifaceted local stories that have regional, national, and even global importance. In addition to editing the Emerald, Chang is also a writer, artist, and documentarian with a lot of storytelling under her belt, including the publication of two nonfiction books — Raising Mixed Race: Multiracial Asian Children in a Post-Racial World (Routledge, 2015) and the memoir Hapa Tales And Other Lies: A Mixed Race Memoir About the Hawai’i I Never Knew (self published in 2018) — both of which explore in academic and personal ways the experience of being mixed race. She is also a photographer and videographer, and is dedicated to documenting underrepresented and underreported stories of the people and places in her community in Seattle, her family and elders in Taiwan, and her own multiracial transnational experience.

Chang spoke with Interviews Editor Sarah Neilson over Zoom about her many, many journalism projects past and present; her experiences with feedback and creative inspiration over time; voting in her first Taiwan presidential election; and what Economies of Harm means to her…

Read the entire interview here.

S2E10 Black Feminist Physics: A Conversation with Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Cite Black Women
November 2020

Christen Smith, Host

In this episode Cite Black Women podcast host Christen Smith sits down with theoretical physicist and feminist theorist Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein to discuss Black feminist physics, the intersections between the matrix of violence against Black women and science, her radical Black feminist upbringing and her forthcoming book, The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey Into Dark Matter, Spacetime, & Dreams Deferred (March 2021, Bold Type Books).

Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Physics and Core Faculty Member in Women’s Studies at the University of New Hampshire. She is also a columnist for New Scientist and Physics World. Her research in theoretical physics focuses on cosmology, neutron stars, and dark matter. Using ideas from both physics and astronomy, she responds to deep questions about how everything in the universe got to the be the way it is. She also does research in Black feminist science, technology, and society studies. Essence magazine recognized her as one of “15 Black Women Who Are Paving the Way in STEM and Breaking Barriers.” She has been profiled in several venues, including TechCrunch, Ms. Magazine, Huffington Post, Gizmodo, Nylon, and the African American Intellectual History Society’s Black Perspectives. A cofounder of the Particles for Justice movement, she has received the 2017 LGBT+ Physicists Acknowledgement of Excellence Award for her contributions to improving conditions for marginalized people in physics, as well as the 2021 American Physical Society Edward A. Bouchet Award for her contributions to particle cosmology. She divides her time between the New Hampshire Seacoast, and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Listen to the interview (01:11:29) here.

Dialogues Beyond the Master’s Map: An Invitation

Carlos Hoyt, Ph.D., LICSW
2022-01-08

My journey has taken me past constructions of race,
past constructions of mixed race,
and into an understanding of human difference
that does not include race as a meaningful category.
–Race and Mixed-Race: A Personal Tour, Rainier Spencer

Introduction

About ten years ago I invited people who resist the practice of racialization to talk with me about why, when, and how they arrived at a point beyond personal and social identity defined and confined by the dogma of race.

Since then, I’ve had the privilege of being able to write, talk, and teach about the implications of the non-racial worldview in a wide variety of contexts. And all along the way, I’ve heard from folks wishing to gather with others who share an anti-racialization orientation. This is an invitation to such a gathering.

If, despite being told and trained and pressured to embrace and perform a sense of identity that represents a false construct of human differences, you defy racial reduction and seek the company of others who resist racialization, please contact me. About a month from the posting of this invitation, sometime in early February, I’ll contact everyone who expressed interest with a date and time for our first gathering (via Zoom) where we’ll share perspectives and narratives of life beyond the master’s map…

To continue reading, click here.