I remember him from the Will Rogers movie "Steamboat Round the Bend". A really good movie, for 1935. It was released after Rogers was killed in a plane crash with Willey Post in Alaska.
I happen to know something about the making of the movie. Rogers was way ahead of his time in the line of ad libing lines in movies. In 'Bend, Rogers had a great time in a private contest with Fetchit to think up funny lines to add to the movie. And Fetchit, I think, beat Will Rogers with the line (when Rogers had lassoed a guy off a dock from a moving steamboat and drug him through the water pretty dramatically) asked the almost drowned guy "could I get you somethin, maybe a glass of water?".
Funny stuff. Fetchit was paid well, and lived grand. I think with a private cheaufer (probably white) and limo.
He wasn't. The stereotyped Black chauffeur in the Charlie Chan series was played most often by Willie Best, who specialized in sleepy, under-motivated servant types and was, I believe, known by the sobriquet "Sleep 'N' Eat". For a marvelous account of his career, and that of Stepin Fetchit and other African-American actors of Hollywood's Golden Age, see film critic Donald Bogle's pioneering study, "Toms, Coons, Mullatos, Mammies and Bucks".