Foxx Redd

American actor and comedian. Foxx was known for taking raucous black comedy and bringing it into the mainstream of American culture on the television sitcom "Sanford and Son." Foxx was deserted by his father when he was age four. His dad left him, his older brother and his mother penniless. A mischievous child, Foxx was once expelled from school for throwing a book back at a teacher who threw it at him first. "School meant nothing to me. Knowing that George Washington crossed the Delaware, how is that going to help me with a brick fight in St. Louis"? At 13 he formed a wash tub band with two friends, Lamont Ousley and Steve Trimel, left home and dropped out of school forever. Playing and passing set the stage for hustling and a hardscrabble adolescence. "Redd is a street man. He knows that to survive, you have to be a good hustler." Four years later, Foxx worked in a musical group known as the Bon Bons and, in 1939, they decided to test their luck. The band hopped a freight train from Chicago to New York and played in subways, street corners and the clubs of Harlem until they broke up two years later. It was in New York that Foxx decided he needed a new name. His friends had called him Fox for his stylish manner and Red because of his red hair. When he saw a sign advertising the slugger Jimmie Foxx he added another d to Red and a comic was born. "The extra letter was so people would remember it." Foxx earned his daily bread by pushing racks in the garment district and bussing tables. A brush with the law found him doing time on Rikerss Island, where he was sentenced for stealing a bottle of milk. "If you can eat, you can think of something funny. But hungry, you can only think of something to eat." His roommate on a tenement rooftop was a man named Malcolm Little, also known as "Red," who later gained renown as Malcolm X. John Sandford became Chicago Red and Malcolm Little was Detroit Red to avoid confusion in the Harlem restaurant where they were both employed. In "The Autobiography of Malcolm X," X wrote that Chicago Red was "the funniest dishwasher on this earth." After finally landing his stand-up first gig in Baltimore, Foxx teamed up with comedian Slappy White in 1941 and together they played the chitlin circuit of the East Coast. Their popularity spread like wildfire among their peers in black entertainment. Singer Dinah Washington persuaded Foxx to come to Los Angeles where recording executive Dootsie Williams saw him at the Brass Rail and signed him to make comedy records. "Laff of the Party" became the contraband favorite of teenagers across the country, selling nearly 15 million copies. Other successful records followed, yet Foxx complained that he was "robbed so bad I just didnt want to make any more." By the early 1960s Foxx was playing the famous Apollo Theater in Harlem where theater owner Bobby Schiffman managed to get a toned down Foxx on "The Tonight Show," which in turn led to more TV appearances and finally, the rarefied rooms of Las Vegas. "I swear to God and any three other white men that youre going to enjoy me" he rasped to the lily white middle class audiences. They did. In 1970, Fox signed a three-year contract guaranteeing him 32 weeks a year in Las Vegas at $10,000 a week. In later years he said, "I figured that was the pinnacle." It was only the beginning. In 1969 Foxx played a minor role in the film "Cotton Comes to Harlem." The unknown actors portrayal of an aging junk deal Read less