Josephine Baker (born Freda Josephine McDonald, naturalized French Joséphine Baker; 3 June 1906-12 April 1975) was an American-born French entertainer, French Resistance agent, and civil rights activist.
Her career was centred primarily in Europe, mostly in her adopted France. She was the first Black woman to star in a major motion picture, the 1927 silent film Siren of the Tropics, directed by Mario Nalpas and Henri Étiévant.
During her early career, Baker was renowned as a dancer, and was among the most celebrated performers to headline the revues of the Folies Bergère in Paris. Her performance in the revue Un vent de folie in 1927 caused a sensation in the city. Her costume, consisting of only a short skirt of artificial bananas and a beaded necklace, became an iconic image and a symbol both of the Jazz Age and the Roaring Twenties.
Baker was celebrated by artists and intellectuals of the era, who variously dubbed her the Black Venus, the Black Pearl, the Bronze Venus, and the Creole Goddess. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, she renounced her U.S. citizenship and became a French national after her marriage to French industrialist Jean Lion in 1937. She raised her children in France.
She was known for aiding the French Resistance during World War II. After the war, she was awarded the Resistance Medal by the French Committee of National Liberation, the Croix de guerre by the French military, and was named a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur by General Charles de Gaulle. Baker once said: I have two loves, my country and Paris.
Baker refused to perform for segregated audiences in the United States and is noted for her contributions to the civil rights movement.
In 1968, she was offered unofficial leadership in the movement in the United States by Coretta Scott King, following Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. After thinking it over, Baker declined the offer out of concern for the welfare of her children.
More information: French Together
Freda Josephine McDonald was born in St. Louis, Missouri. Her mother, Carrie, was adopted in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1886 by Richard and Elvira McDonald, both of whom were former slaves of African and Native American descent. Baker's estate identifies vaudeville drummer Eddie Carson as her natural father, despite evidence to the contrary. Baker's foster son Jean-Claude Baker wrote a biography, published in 1993, titled Josephine: The Hungry Heart.
Baker's consistent badgering of a show manager in her hometown led to her being recruited for the St. Louis Chorus vaudeville show. At the age of 15, she headed to New York City during the Harlem Renaissance, performing at the Plantation Club, Florence Mills' old stomping ground, and in the chorus lines of the groundbreaking and hugely successful Broadway revues Shuffle Along (1921) with Adelaide Hall and The Chocolate Dandies (1924).
Baker performed as the last dancer on the end of the chorus line, where her act was to perform in a comic manner, as if she were unable to remember the dance, until the encore, at which point she would perform it not only correctly but with additional complexity. A term of the time describes this part of the cast as The Pony.
Baker was billed at the time as the highest-paid chorus girl in vaudeville. Her career began with blackface comedy at local clubs; this was the entertainment
of which her mother had disapproved; however, these performances landed
Baker an opportunity to tour in Paris, which would become the place she
called home until her final days.
Baker sailed to Paris for a new venture, and opened in La Revue Nègre on 2 October 1925, aged 19, at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées.
Baker performed the Danse Sauvage wearing a costume consisting of a skirt made of a string of artificial bananas. Her success coincided (1925) with the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs, which gave birth to the term Art Deco, and also with a renewal of interest in non-Western forms of art, including African.
Baker represented one aspect of this fashion. In later shows in Paris, she was often accompanied on stage by her pet cheetah Chiquita, who was adorned with a diamond collar. The cheetah frequently escaped into the orchestra pit, where it terrorized the musicians, adding another element of excitement to the show. After a while, Baker was the most successful American entertainer working in France. Ernest Hemingway called her the most sensational woman anyone ever saw. The author spent hours talking with her in Paris bars. Picasso drew paintings depicting her alluring beauty. Jean Cocteau became friendly with her and helped vault her to international stardom.
In September 1939, when France declared war on Germany in response to the invasion of Poland, Baker was recruited by the Deuxième Bureau, the French military intelligence agency, as an honorable correspondent.
Baker collected what information she could about German troop locations from officials she met at parties. She specialized in gatherings at embassies and ministries, charming people as she had always done, while gathering information. Her café-society fame enabled her to rub shoulders with those in the know, from high-ranking Japanese officials to Italian bureaucrats, and to report back what she heard.
When the Germans invaded France, Baker left Paris and went to the Château des Milandes, her home in the Dordogne département in the south of France. She housed people who were eager to help the Free French effort led by Charles de Gaulle and supplied them with visas.
Later in 1941, she and her entourage went to the French colonies in North Africa. The stated reason was Baker's health, since she was recovering from another case of pneumonia, but the real reason was to continue helping the Resistance.
More information: NMAAHC-Smithsonian
After the war, Baker received the Croix de guerre and the Rosette de la Résistance. She was made a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur by General Charles de Gaulle.
Although based in France, Baker supported the Civil Rights Movement during the 1950s. When she arrived in New York with her husband Jo, they were refused reservations at 36 hotels because of racial discrimination. She was so upset by this treatment that she wrote articles about the segregation in the United States. She also began travelling into the South. She gave a talk at Fisk University, a historically Black college in Nashville, Tennessee, on France, North Africa and the Equality of the Races in France.
She refused to perform for segregated audiences in the United States, although she was offered $10,000 by a Miami club. The club eventually met her demands. Her insistence on mixed audiences helped to integrate live entertainment shows in Las Vegas, Nevada. After this incident, she began receiving threatening phone calls from people claiming to be from the Ku Klux Klan but said publicly that she was not afraid of them.
Baker worked with the NAACP. Her reputation as a crusader grew to such an extent that the NAACP had Sunday, 20 May 1951 declared Josephine Baker Day. She was presented with life membership with the NAACP by Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr. Ralph Bunche.
In 1963, she spoke at the March on Washington at the side of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Baker was the only official female speaker. While wearing her Free French uniform emblazoned with her medal of the Légion d'honneur, she introduced the Negro Women for Civil Rights.
Rosa Parks and Daisy Bates were among those she acknowledged, and both gave brief speeches. Not everyone involved wanted Baker present at the March; some thought her time overseas had made her a woman of France, one who was disconnected from the Civil Rights issues going on in America.
More information: Radio Prague International
You must go to school,
and you must learn to protect yourself.
And you must learn to protect yourself with the pen,
and not the gun.
Josephine Baker
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