Josephine Baker – Experiment in Brotherhood

/ historicallywoman

Born into poverty and forced into service work by the age of eight, few could have predicted the glamorous turn Josephine Baker’s life would take. Thousands of people would be attracted to her shows and she would spend fifty years entertaining the world, with friends such as Grace Kelly, Mick Jagger, and Jackie Kennedy attending her 50 years celebrations. Baker did more than just perform, however; she was a dedicated civil rights activist, and during World War II she acted as a spy for France, a task which she managed with ease despite her great fame.

Freda Josephine McDonald grew up in a low-income neighbourhood in St. Louis, Missouri. Her childhood was not a happy one – she was constantly hungry and poorly dressed, her father, Edward Carson (who may not have been her true father) abandoned Baker and her mother shortly after Baker’s birth, she was abused in the white homes she worked in to support her family (aged 8-10 at the time), and she had left school by the time she was 12.

Aged 13, she ran away from home and began waitressing in the Old Chauffeur’s Club, during which time she lived on the streets and made money through street-corner dancing. It was at the club that she met her first husband, Willie Wells, but they divorced shortly after. She married for the second time in 1921 (aged 15) to Willie Baker, taking his surname and dropping the Freda from her own name. 

Josephine Baker in one of her iconic costumes

Baker had developed a taste for the theatrical early in life and she managed to lobby her way into a vaudeville show in the city. When the troupe moved to New York City, Baker moved with them, leaving her husband behind (and eventually divorcing him in 1925). She performed in the chorus line in Broadway shows including The Chocolate Dandies and Shuffle Along. She was a crowd favourite, due to her special role as a comic turn, which involved pretending to mess up routines until the final number, during which she would dance spectacularly. From there, Baker’s career quickly took off.

In 1925 she was recruited to an all-Black production called La Revue Nègre based in Paris. She was uncharacteristically nervous before the move, citing the day she left as the ‘one single day of fear in my life’. 

The feeling quickly passed, and she soon became one of the most sought-after performers in Paris. She performed the Danse Sauvage, an erotic number that had her wearing nothing but feathery bikini bottoms. 

Baker loved Paris just as much as they loved her. France was a country without segregation, and Baker was amazed when she was able to walk into a restaurant and sit at a table with white people after her first show with La Revue Nègre. So attached to France was she that she added an accent to her name (becoming Joséphine) and ended up renouncing her American citizenship and becoming a French national after marrying her third husband in 1937. In 1926 she broke her contract with La Revue Nègre after just two stops on their European tour and returned to Paris, joining the Folies Bergère.

It is at this point where Baker’s stardom truly took hold. While appearing in a show called La Folie du Jour, she came on stage wearing just a skirt made of 16 fake bananas. She became a Jazz Age icon and soon began singing professionally. She also played the leading role in a silent film entitled La Sirène des Tropiques. 

Due to her popularity in France, Baker decided to return home to the US in 1936 as part of the Zeigfeld Follies Broadway show, but she came up against strong racism and returned to her beloved France a year later, taking French citizenship.

At the outbreak of World War II, Baker was able to travel largely uninterrupted due to her status as a performer. While she did perform for troops, her greater role was as a spy for the French Resistance. She attended parties where she rubbed shoulders with German, Italian, and Japanese officials, gathering information on their locations and movements without attracting any suspicion. Later in the war, she also established a base in Dordogne where she accommodated those willing to help the Free French resistance movement, and she used innovative techniques to carry information. These included writing in invisible ink on her sheet music and pinning notes to her underwear, counting on her celebrity to avoid strip searches. 

For her heroic efforts, Baker was awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Rosette de la Résistance, two of France’s highest military honours.

Surely the day will come when colour means nothing more than the skin tone, when religion is seen uniquely as a way to speak one’s soul, when birth places have the weight of a throw of the dice and all men are born free, when understanding breeds love and brotherhood.

Josephine Baker

She returned to the stage after the war and married her fourth husband (her third marriage ended in divorce in 1940, as would her fourth in 1961). I want to note here that Baker was bisexual, and had several relationships with women, including French novelist Colette, and possibly Frida Kahlo.

In the 1950s, Baker’s activism began in earnest. In an attempt to reconnect with her birth country, she travelled back to the US, where she and her husband were refused entry to 36 hotels due to racial discrimination. She spoke publicly against segregation and refused to play to segregated audiences, despite threats by the Ku Klux Klan. She was named ‘Most Outstanding Woman of the Year’ in 1951 by the NAACP. In the same year, she made charges of racism against the Stork Club in Manhattan, an exclusive club where stars, royalty, singers, and socialites made appearances. She was supported in her efforts by Grace Kelly, who stormed out of the club with Baker on the night in question, forging a strong friendship.

The incident led to a backlash against Baker, but the support for her was just as great, with activists turning out to demand justice. Even so, Baker was forced to leave the US due to accusations of communism, and wouldn’t be allowed to return for another decade.

Baker in her uniform during World War II

During this time, Baker also adopted twelve children from several different countries (two girls from France and Morocco, ten boys from Korea, Japan, Colombia, Finland, France, Israel, Algeria, Venezuela, and the Ivory Coast). She called them her ‘rainbow tribe’ and said it was an ‘experiment in brotherhood’ to prove people of different skin colours, religions, and backgrounds could all live together in harmony. 

In 1963, she was one of the few women to speak at the March on Washington and, after Martin Luther King’s death, Coretta Scott King asked Baker to become the new leader of the movement. However, Baker declined, saying that her children were ‘too young to lose their mother’.

She officially retired from performing in 1956, but she returned to the stage multiple times over the next two decades. Notably, in 1973, she received a standing ovation at the Carnegie Hall in New York, where not so long ago all she had been greeted with was racism. Baker was so moved by the event that she wept in front of her audience.

In April 1975, Baker participated in her final show, an extravaganza celebrating her 50 years as a performer. The show, which took place at the Bobino Theatre in Paris, was sold out. Four days later, however, she suffered a brain haemorrhage and fell into a coma, dying soon after on 12th April. 

More than 20,000 people lined the streets on the day of her funeral and she was honoured with a 21-gun salute, making her the first American woman in history to be buried with French military honours.

Baker dedicated her life to smashing boundaries and fighting injustice. Whether on the stage or the front lines, she was tirelessly committed to making the world a better place. And, I think it’s safe to say that she certainly managed to achieve that goal.

Sources:

Leave a Reply