With her banana skirt, dance, and charisma, Josephine Baker won over all of 20th century Paris. The dancer moved to Paris from Saint Louis and found fame on the stage of the Folies Bergère and the Casino de Paris where she sang J'ai deux amours, mon pays et Paris. Regarded as the first Black icon, Josephine Baker used her popularity to help others, as she was a civil rights activist and promoted the ideas of Martin Luther-King, Jr. Josephine Baker is an icon who still inspires us today.
Her 5 most inspiring quotes
"I shall dance all my life. . . . I would like to die, breathless, spent, at the end of a dance."
“You must get an education. 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.”
“One day I realized I was living in a country where I was afraid to be black. It was only a country for white people. Not black. So I left. I had been suffocating in the United States… A lot of us left, not because we wanted to leave, but because we couldn’t stand it anymore… I felt liberated in Paris.”
“All men can live together, if they wish to.”
“I have two loves: my country and Paris.”
Also on Vogue.fr:
10 women who marked the history of dance
10 inspiring quotes by Martin Luther King Jr.
Translated by Maria Atallah
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