"I have two loves, my country and Paris," Josephine Baker famously declared in her signature song from the 1930s. But the flamboyant entertainer's heart belonged to much more than France and America alone. It embraced humanity at large—whether dazzling audiences onstage, combatting racism, aiding the Allied cause in WWII, or adopting a "rainbow tribe" of children.
Baker captivated the globe as the first black international superstar, leveraging her fame to break barriers and crusade for civil rights, women's empowerment and global unity. Her remarkable journey from scrubbing St. Louis floors to commanding Parisian revues and covert espionage missions seems almost mythic in scope.
"She is one of the most emblematic figures of the 20th century, a woman who devoted her life to the twin quests for liberty and justice," reflects French historian Pap Ndiaye. Nearly fifty years after her death, Baker continues to inspire as a leading symbol of black excellence and unbridled female self-expression.
Early Life and Career
Freda Josephine McDonald was born into acute poverty on June 3, 1906, in St. Louis, Missouri. Her mother, Carrie, worked as a washerwoman to support the family after her father, Eddie, abandoned them. At just eight years old, Baker began cleaning houses to help make ends meet. She was married four times, notably adopting the last name Baker from her second husband, William Baker, whom she married in 1921 and divorced in 1925. She also married Willie Wells, Jean Lion, and Jo Bouillon, each marriage ending in divorce.
Two traumatic events marred her childhood—a race riot she witnessed in East St. Louis and sexual abuse by a white employer. These early encounters with racism and misogyny ignited a fierce determination to rebel against the bigoted confines placed on black women.
At age 13, Baker fled her impoverished hometown to join a traveling vaudeville troupe, honing her comedic timing and dancing. By 16, she landed a gig with the first all-black Broadway musical, Shuffle Along. Her rubbery expressions and acrobatic moves quickly stole the show.
Baker's star turn caught the eye of a theatre producer assembling an all-black revue to dazzle Paris. He offered the 19-year-old chorine a featured spot in "La Revue Nègre," whisking her off to the City of Lights in 1925.
The Birth of a Jazz Age Icon
Overnight, Baker became the toast of the Parisian artistic demimonde, electrifying audiences with her uninhibited style. Performing in little more than a feather skirt, she shimmied, mugged and gyrated with wild abandon, sending crowds into euphoric frenzies.
Her subversive eroticism and charisma tapped into France's voracious appetite for jazz, primitivism and exoticism. Baker's dynamic stage presence shattered staid Edwardian norms of female restraint and passivity.
"She made her triumphant rise to stardom as a comic, a kind of female clown, in a banana skirt and later in her trademark leopard-print costume. She appealed to the French fascination with 'primitive' bodies grounded in colonial racialism and notions of primeval Africanness," explains theatre historian Jayna Brown.
Baker cannily exploited tropes of "savagery" to both titillate and critique. She knowingly played on racist fantasies of the hypersexual black woman, luring in audiences, only to flip the script by asserting total control over her image and mobility.
Her impish subversions of bourgeois propriety and gendered expectations proved tremendously liberating, granting Baker an artistic freedom unthinkable for a working-class African American woman in 1920s America.
Within a year, Baker emerged as Europe's most magnetic performer, spreading a prolific image in countless paintings, posters and sculptures. Her celebrity transcended racial boundaries in a way no black entertainer had before.
"Josephine represented something new, a figure of liberated Black femininity that shattered stereotypes. She revolutionized dance as a form of individual expression and cultural hybridity," reflects Ndiaye.
Confronting Racism and Fascism
Baker's spectacular success abroad threw into sharp relief the painful limits placed on African Americans striving at home in the 1920s. Her return trips to the U.S. were often marred by segregation, discriminatory treatment, and even race riots outside her performances.
In one notorious incident, Baker was refused service at New York's famous Stork Club in 1951, prompting her to launch a highly publicized media battle with Walter Winchell, the powerful columnist and unofficial spokesperson for the segregated club.
The humiliation of being barred from establishments where she headlined galvanized Baker to wield her global megaphone as an activist. She began advocating vocally for desegregation and racial equality, insisting on inclusive audiences and lodging on her tours.
"Josephine was keenly attuned to her role as a symbol of black excellence and cosmopolitanism," reflects biographer Matthew Guterl. "She saw the linkage of her personal freedom to larger struggles for justice."
During WWII, Baker's crusade took on an even more urgent tenor as she watched fascism engulf her beloved France. Refusing to perform for Nazi occupying forces, she joined the French Resistance as a spy—smuggling secret messages across borders in her sheet music and pinning notes inside her underwear.
When the Allies landed in North Africa, Baker lifted troop morale by singing and visiting over 500 frontline hospitals. She also assisted countless Jewish refugees in escaping to safety, using her celebrity to secure visa sponsorships.
"France made me who I am... Parisians gave me everything, I am prepared to give them my life," Baker asserted about the country that had given her freedom.
In recognition of Baker's extraordinary wartime courage, she was awarded the Croix de Guerre, the Rosette of the Resistance, and was named a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur—France's highest order of merit. She became the first American-born woman to receive full French military honors at her funeral.
Advancing Civil Rights and Global Equality
Emboldened by her clandestine feats, Baker threw herself into humanitarian causes with renewed zeal after the war. She leveraged her star wattage for various progressive campaigns, from fundraising for the historically black college Fisk University, to boycotting segregated venues, to supporting decolonization movements in Africa.
In 1951, Baker made headlines by filing a complaint with the FBI over death threats she received for her forceful civil rights advocacy. She then gave a series of high-profile speeches calling for federal intervention to end racist violence in the South, as the earliest rumblings of the freedom movement took hold in Montgomery.
At the height of these racial tensions, Baker made her most defiant declaration yet—adopting 12 children of different ethnic backgrounds from around the world. She called her multiracial brood "the rainbow tribe", using them to showcase her vision of a more tolerant, inclusive society.
"I will prove that human beings can respect each other if given the chance, through my Rainbow Tribe," Baker proclaimed. "Little souls in my arms, I will raise you to become symbols of tolerance, symbols of love."
In 1963, Baker brought her "living experiment in brotherhood" to Washington, D.C., as the only female speaker at the March on Washington. Appearing in her Free French uniform, she stirred the crowd of 250,000 with a clarion call for justice that transcended national boundaries.
"You know I have always taken the rocky path. I never took the easy one, but as I get older, and as I knew I had the power and the strength, I took that rocky path, and I tried to smooth it out a little. I wanted to make it easier for you. I want you to have a chance at what I had," Baker implored the audience. "But I do not want you to have to run away to get it."
Legacy and Contemporary Relevance
When Josephine Baker passed away from a cerebral hemorrhage in 1975, over 20,000 people lined the streets of Paris to mourn the loss of their beloved icon. She received a 21-gun salute, making her the first American woman buried with full French military honors.
But Baker's cultural impact extended far beyond the boulevards of Paris alone. Her meteoric rise from impoverished refugee to the world's first black female superstar paved the way for future generations of barrier-breaking performers of color.
"Josephine opened the door for us. She was the first black superstar. She was a fighter, she was an activist, she was passionate, and she loved what she did," reflects singer and actress Andra Day.
Baker's virtuosic transformations on stage—from wide-eyed ingenue, to sultry siren, to androgynous soldier—also shattered norms around black femininity and sexuality. She carved out a more fluid spectrum of self-expression by defying rigid categorization. Her subversive appropriations of minstrelsy, consumerism and patriotism were later echoed by artists ranging from Madonna to Beyoncé.
"Like many black women performers to follow, Josephine both contested and made use of racialized and sexualized stereotypes, simultaneously building on and undermining them...she opened up new ways of imagining black womanhood," notes pop culture scholar Jayna Brown.
Contemporary inheritors of Baker's mantle continue to invoke her fluid movement between activism and art. The slogan "Josephine Baker in the Battlefield" has emerged in recent years at rallies from Black Lives Matter to the #MeToo Movement—connecting Baker's boundary-pushing advocacy to today's global struggles against racism and gendered violence.
As one of the most photographed women of the 20th century, Josephine Baker's glamorous iconography remains ubiquitous—gracing everything from dorm room posters to coffee mugs worldwide. Her signature banana skirt and dazzling smile are often what first come to mind when picturing the Jazz Age legend.
But beyond this glittering surface lies a deeper legacy of a woman who devoted her life to liberating others from oppression—whether by electrifying audiences on stage, smuggling secret messages behind enemy lines, adopting a "rainbow tribe" of children, or rousing crowds at the March on Washington.
Over a century since her birth, Josephine Baker continues to inspire as an icon of resilience, rebellion and reinvention who transcended boundaries of race, class, gender and nation in her unyielding pursuit of justice and freedom for all.
"I did take the rocky road, but it was the only way." Josephine Baker
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