NEED TO KNOW
Kenneth Washington, a familiar face on television in the 1960s and ’70s and the last surviving main cast member of Hogan’s Heroes, has died. He was 88.
Washington died on July 18, according to Variety, who first reported the news. No cause of death was shared.
His cousin, Derek Olivia, mourned the loss in a public Facebook post. “Yesterday we had to say goodbye to my big cousin Kenneth Washington,” Olivia wrote, alongside a series of photos of the star. “Kenneth was surrounded by friends and family whom loved him. Rest in eternal peace.”
The actor joined Hogan’s Heroes in 1970 for its sixth and final season, playing Sergeant Richard Baker — making history as one of the few Black actors with a regular role on a network sitcom at the time. The CBS series, about a group of Allied prisoners in a prisoner-of-war camp in Nazi Germany during World War II, ended a year later.
CBS via Getty
Washington’s legacy on screen continued, though. Throughout his career, the California native appeared on a variety of hit shows, including Star Trek, I Dream of Jeannie, My Three Sons, Marcus Welby, M.D., and The Rockford Files. He was the first and only Black actor to be featured in a major guest role on 1963’s Petticoat Junction.
On film, he had a role in the 1973 sci-fi classic Westworld and the TV movies J. Edgar Hoover, Money on the Side and Our Family Business.
His final on-screen credit was in 1989 in another monumental sitcom: A Different World, opposite Jasmine Guy, Lisa Bonet and Kadeem Hardison.
After retiring from acting, Washington returned to school and earned his degree from Loyola Marymount University in L.A., later becoming a professor there and at Southwest College in the city, where he taught courses on speech, oral interpretation and Black actors in film.
Washington was married twice, first to Alyce Loretta Hawkins (from 1959 to 1969). He wed journalist Alice Marshall, former editor-in-chief of Wave Newspapers and film reviews editor at Variety, in 2001.
He is survived by his wife; his brother Johnnie and sister Aaliyah Akbar; his children Kim Lee, Kenneth Jr. and Quianna Stokes-Washington, as well as three grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
The last living Hogan’s Heroes cast member prior to Washington was Robert Clary, who died in November 2022 at the age of 96.
