Josephine Baker

1906 -1975

Article by Anabel Pederson

Josephine Baker has been best known for her high energy live jazz performances, swaying vocals, and sensational dances. A token of the jazz age, Freda Josephine McDonald was born in St. Louis, Missouri. She worked hard when she was growing up, taking jobs as live-in help for wealthier families and performing dances on the street. She began dancing in chorus lines and vaudeville shows. Her music and performances were the marvels

of the 1920’s. Sensational, stunning, and sensual, Josephine Baker wowed audiences with her risqué outfits and energetic dance routines. Perhaps most famously was her Danse Sauvage, where she performed in a skirt made out of bananas.

After touring in Europe, she eventually settled in France. Josephine struggled in America, being an African American woman in entertainment was full of constant challenges. She gained permanent citizenship in France, and seldom returned to the U.S. in her later years. During World War II, she was an intelligence operative for France, using her status and connections as a celebrity to attend parties with Japanese and Italian officers and relay that information to the Free France movement. She was awarded French Baker’s stage presence was enrapturing, her rise to fame came alongside the arrival of art deco and a revival of African art styles. She was a supporter of the American Civil Rights Movement despite living in France, refusing to perform for segregated audiences while in America and

speaking at the March on Washington. When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, his wife Coretta Scott King asked Baker to take over as leader for the Civil Rights movement, but she declined because she did not want her children to lose their mother when they were so young.

Baker’s children were just as sensational as she was known to be. She adopted twelve children from ten different countries, and called them the Rainbow Tribe. Her children were used as a metaphor in the face of racism, Baker wanted to prove that “children of different ethnicities and religions could still be brothers”. While some aspects of this family were problematic, Baker still held good intentions in making it. Baker was married six times, though multiple were publicity stunts and not legally binding. She was also bisexual and had several relationships with women, including even a rumored affair with Frida Kahlo.

Josephine Baker was a beautiful, bold woman who inserted herself in the musical world with unapologetic charisma. She had a strong sense of self in a time where her identity might have made the world look the other way. As a LBGT+, African American woman, Josephine Baker rose to unprecedented revere in the world by being an example of strength, beauty, and courage through her music and performances.