Body and Soul

HE FILM THAT CATAPULTED FREDI WASHINGTON TO FAME WAS JOHN M. STAHL’S 1934 adaptation of , for her role as a housekeeper’s daughter who is passing as white. Anticipating the reaction to her performance as the woeful Peola Johnson, she told Associated Negro Press reporter Fay Jackson, “I don’t want to ‘pass’ because I can’t stand insincerities and shams. I am just as much Negro as any of the others identified with the race.” Later she became one of the founders of the Negro Actors Guild. Her brother-in-law, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., was the first African-American elected to Congress from New York, and then-president of the NAACP Walter Francis White counted her among his closest allies. But Washington had played the role so well that critics and audiences alike could not shake the art of it. The question of