“A year ago when I decided to come to North America, I had it put in my contract that I would not appear in any city where my people could not come to see me, and at each time that there has been an approach to my coming to St. Louis I have always refused,” Josephine Baker said on February 3, 1952. She was at her first performance in St. Louis since leaving almost 30 years earlier due to the city’s issues with segregation. “Oh, I have had several fantastic offers in the first class theaters and nightclubs, but when the question arrived about my people coming to see me, immediately there was a silence.”
By 1952, Baker had been the toast of Paris for decades. The bisexual singer, actress, and dancer became so revered there that one only needed to say “Josephine” or “La Baker” and everyone knew who she was. But beloved though she was in France, she found it heartbreaking that she wasn’t as loved in her own country.
Born in St. Louis on June 3, 1906, Josephine Baker witnessed and experienced intense racism in the Midwestern city. As a teen, she suffered physical and sexual abuse in the homes of the white families for whom she worked, and experienced periods of homelessness; she joined traveling black performance troupes as a young teenager in the late 1910s, but even then found it hard to gain a permanent role in their chorus due to its racist hiring practices. In 1922, she finally earned a chorus role in the traveling production of Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake’s musical Shuffle Along, one of the first all-black musicals on Broadway. She performed across New York, her unique, charismatic combination of dance and humor sending her into the spotlight. But she decided to leave the States for Paris just three years later, hoping to also leave its racism behind.
At the time, Parisians were enamored of and enthralled by jazz, the Harlem Renaissance, and African culture. Their fascination, plus Baker's obvious talent, made her a star. At the renowned Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, she joined in a review of black performers called La Revue Nègre, which also included legendary jazz musician Sidney Bechet. There, she performed what became known as her Danse Sauvage, a spirited dance then considered seductive and erotic. Despite what we’d now see as the troubling, othering, and colonialist aspects of the scenario, Baker became a verifiable sensation across France. She soon received top billing at the renowned Parisian cabaret and music hall Folies-Bergère, where she performed in a now-famed skirt of 16 bananas, as well as the Casino de Paris. Baker soon parlayed the fame gained from her danse sauvage and reinvented herself as a chanteuse when she began singing in 1930. She became known for her song “J’ai Deux Amours,” meaning “I have two loves,” which Baker took to mean France and the United States.
It was always challenging to Baker that she could not reach American audiences the way she had the French. In France, Baker had a cosmetic line, Bakerfix, through which she sold skin darkening treatments and hair gel that women used in hopes of resembling her. Dolls of her banana skirted-self sold by the thousands. She was the muse to celebrated couturier Paul Poiret and photographed by master fashion photographer George Hoyningen-Huene. Postcards of her visage were insanely popular. “As a black woman, had she stayed in the United States, she could not have accomplished what she did,” said Bennetta Jules-Rosette, author of the biography Josephine Baker In Art and Life. In those years black women were still playing maids on screen in the U.S., if they were there at all; they weren’t in glamorous starring roles as Baker was in France.
Yet when Baker performed on the U.S. stage with the Ziegfeld Follies in 1936, in numbers assembled by celebrated choreographer (and later New York City Ballet co-founder) George Balanchine no less, the show received scathing, racist reviews with venom aimed at her. “Some of the reviews attacked Baker specifically, by mapping current racial stereotypes and crippling expectations onto her and her performance — expectations which had not affected her career in France in such an irrevocably stark manner,” Melanie Zeck wrote for the Oxford University Press in 2014.
Baker became a French citizen in 1937 when she married industrialist Jean Lion, though throughout her life she was rumored to have affairs with women (including one rumored affair with Frida Kahlo). Reports alternate whether or not Baker was open about her sexuality during her lifetime. While she moved in artistic circles where she would have had the opportunity to be more openly fluid, she also lived at a time when and performed for audiences where being out on a larger scale could have damaged her career.
Baker served her adopted country in the war as a spy for the French Resistance, carrying around messages written in invisible ink on her sheet music and images of German military installations in her underwear. She also concealed weapons and Jewish refugees in her chateau, Les Milandes. For her work, she was honored with both the Croix de Guerre, a French medal given for bravery, and the Legion of Honour, given to those demonstrating dedication to equality and liberty, with an added Resistance rosette.
But Baker never truly gave up on the U.S., and she knew even her beloved Europe had much to learn about its treatment of people of color and Jews. Every time she returned to the States, now as an international icon, she challenged her country to change its ways, refusing to perform in segregated establishments. In fact, it wasn’t Sammy Davis, Jr. and Frank Sinatra who desegregated Las Vegas — it was Josephine Baker, for which she is rarely credited. In the 1950s, she regularly worked with the NAACP, but when the organization invited her to speak in Atlanta in 1951, she canceled her engagement because she was refused lodging in the city. She was refused at several other restaurants and hotels on that tour of the U.S. as well. The NAACP still valued her work and commitment to civil rights and declared May 20, 1951 “Josephine Baker Day.” She wouldn’t perform in her hometown of St. Louis until February 1952, when she gave her aforementioned speech after the city’s Kiel Auditorium finally allowed desegregated audiences to come see her. Baker also considered part of her civil rights efforts the development of her “Rainbow Tribe.” Baker adopted children from a variety of backgrounds, hoping to show that all ethnicities can live in harmony. She started in 1953, and there would ultimately be 12 children in her tribe.
Later in the 1950s, Baker performed to raise funds for France’s International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism. She’s also the only woman who spoke at 1963’s March on Washington. “I have walked into the palaces of kings and queens and into the houses of presidents. And much more. But I could not walk into a hotel in America and get a cup of coffee, and that made me mad,” Baker said. “And when I get mad, you know that I open my big mouth. And then look out, ’cause when Josephine opens her mouth, they hear it all over the world....”
Baker worked on and off from 1959 to 1975, often so she could maintain Les Milandes and her family. She ultimately lost the home, but Grace Kelly, then Princess Grace of Monaco, offered the family a villa. Baker took the stage once more in 1975 and was as much the toast of Paris as she ever was. But the next night, after thunderous applause during her performance, she passed away in her sleep of a cerebral hemorrhage. Some 20,000 people mourned her passing in the streets of Paris.
Today Baker is remembered as one of the first black sex symbols of the 20th century. Whether or not she was out, the unapologetic force of her sexuality set a standard of possibility and positivity for those following her, which was not just groundbreaking but earth-shattering for a woman of color at the time. And in her lifetime, Baker fought against the racial injustices built into societies around the world, with a special focus on her home country. While much of her work brought about change and there’s still much work to be done, she remains a beacon of what it looks like to use one’s platform for good. “People are dying so that you will be able to live in peace,” she said in 1952. “Try to understand and love each other before it is too late.”
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