This Is How Redd Foxx Really Got His Name

May 2024 ยท 1 minute read

Redd Foxx was born Jon Elroy Sanford on December 9, 1922 in St. Louis, Missouri. According to Historic Missourians, his father left him, his older brother, and their mother, causing his mother to move to Chicago to find work to support them. The Sanford brothers lived with their grandmother in what Sanford said was an "old wood shack of a house" until middle school, when they joined their mother in Chicago.

Once in Chicago, at age 13, Sanford supported himself by playing washboard in a band. The Redd Foxx official website (via the Wayback Machine) stated that he played with the band for about three years, until they broke up, at which point the 16-year-old caught a train to New York City. Having grown up with a rather ruddy complexion, apparently "Redd" (or "Red," depending on the speaker) had become a common nickname by this time. That nickname would be cemented when he worked as a dishwasher in Harlem alongside Malcolm Little, later to be much better known as civil rights leader Malcolm X. Little referred to Sanford as "Chicago Red, the funniest dishwasher on this earth."

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