Josephine Baker

Dictionary of Missouri Biography, edited by Lawrence O. Christensen, William E. Foley, Gary R. Kremer, and Kenneth H. Winn (University of Missouri Press, 1999)

Josephine Baker (1906-1975) escaped a childhood marked by poverty and racism to become an international superstar and the personification of Jazz Age exoticism as lead dancer for the Folies-Bergère Revue in Paris in the 1920s. In a career that spanned five decades, Baker earned acclaim as a dancer, singer, stage and film actress, and political activist. Despite her success, though, she never forgot her humble origins, and devoted her life to fighting prejudice and helping the oppressed, playing an active role in the French resistance against Nazism during World War II, as well as in the American civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.

Baker was born June 3, 1906, in St. Louis. Her mother, Carrie McDonald, a domestic worker and amateur dancer, had arrived in St. Louis two years earlier from South Carolina. Josephine’s father Eddie Carson, a musician who played in bands around the Chestnut valley, a red-light district near Union Station, deserted the family shortly after the birth of the couple’s second child in 1907. Baker grew up in abject poverty. As a child, she was sent with her brother to Soulard Market to scavenge for food and to Union Station to steal coal from the freight cars. As she later commented, “I started dancing to keep warm” during the cold Missouri winters.

At the age of eleven, Baker observed in horror the July 1917 race riot in East St. Louis, a signal event in her developing consciousness. As thousands of blacks fled across Eads Bridge to St. Louis, she remembered, “We children stood huddled together in bewilderment. We were hiding behind the skirts of grown-ups, frightened to death.” Afterward, St. Louis served as a negative reference point, a symbol of everything she sought to escape. “For me,” she said, “St. Louis represents a city of fear and humiliation.”

After a brief marriage at age thirteen, Baker joined a group of street performers called the Jones Family Band, which played in the area around the Booker T. Washington Theater, a black vaudeville house at Market and Twenty-third Streets. Mrs. Jones taught Baker to play trombone, and the band played ragtime, passing the hat for money. When a troupe called the Dixie Steppers played the Booker T. Washington, the Jones Family Band was brought in as an opening act. The band was invited to accompany the Steppers when they left St. Louis to tour the South. When the band dissolved shortly thereafter, Baker remained on the tour as a dresser for one of the stars, blues singer Clara Smith. Eventually she worked her way into the chorus line.

Following another brief marriage at age fifteen to Willie Baker, in 1921 Baker earned a spot in the Broadway show Shuffle Along, with music by Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake. Beginning in the chorus, Baker’s improvisational dancing and comedic talents quickly propelled her to star status. When the successful Shuffle Along finally closed, she gained a part in Sissle and Blake’s next show, The Chocolate Dandies. In 1925 she traveled to Paris to perform in La Revue Negro, a black song-and-dance revue.

An instant success in Paris, Baker quickly became the star of the Folies-Bergère Revue, where her nearly nude jazz dancing caused a sensation. Throughout France, her popularity was extraordinary, as people bought Josephine Baker perfumes, dolls, and costumes, and many women imitated her slicked-down, short haircut. She was constantly in the news, whether for her exotic menagerie, which included a pet leopard, or her many public love affairs. Throughout Europe, Baker associated with the rich and famous, including such prominent artists and intellectuals as Max Reinhardt, Georges Simenon, and Colette. Erich Maria Remarque commented that Baker “brought a blast of jungle air, elemental power, and beauty, into the tired stages of Western civilization.”

Although she rose to fame as a dancer, Baker began singing publicly in the early 1930s. Her signature song was Vincent Scotto’s “J’ai deux amours,” which told of her two loves, her country and Paris. She also starred in such French films as Zou-Zou (1934) and Princess Tam-Tam (1935). In 1936 she sought to return to America and gain success in her home country, starring in Ziegfield’s Follies. But the reaction of the mainstream press was not friendly. Much of the response reflected the American reluctance to let an African American performer succeed in anything other than stereotypical roles. As Time’s critic wrote:

Josephine Baker is a St. Louis washer-woman’s daughter who stepped out of a Negro burlesque show into a life of adulation and luxury in Paris during the booming 1920s. In sex appeal to jaded Europeans of the jazz-loving type, a Negro wench always has a head start. . . . But to Manhattan theater goers last week she was just a slightly buck-toothed young Negro woman whose figure might be matched in any night-club show, and whose dancing and singing might be topped practically anywhere outside of Pars.

Returning to Paris, Baker married again, this time to the wealthy Jewish sugar-broker Jean Lion. Although the two filed for divorce only a year after their wedding, they were still officially married when the Germans invaded France in 1940, making Baker a member of two groups victimized by Nazi policies—Negroes and Jews. During the occupation, Baker refused to perform in Nazi-controlled areas, living in southern France and later northern Africa. An early partisan of Charles de Gaulle, Baker helped several people escape France and used her connections in Italy to gain information concerning Mussolini’s Fascist government, which she passed to the Allies. While living in Africa, she developed a severe case of septicemia that nearly killed her and forced an extended convalescence. Upon her recovery, she toured north Africa and the Middle East, entertaining Allied troops and performing benefits for the resistance. In honor of her services, Baker was made a sublieutenant in the Women’s Auxiliary of the French Air Force and earned a Medal of the Resistance. In awarding her the medal, de Gaulle stated he was “touched by the enthusiasm with which she had dedicated her talent to the cause of the resistance.”

After the war Baker devoted herself to the cause of civil rights for African Americans. During her 1951 tour of the United States, she refused to perform before segregated audiences, a demand that broke color barriers in such cities as Miami and Las Vegas. She publicly associated herself with several controversial civil rights cases, including that of Willie McGee, a black Mississippi truck driver sentenced to death for raping a white woman. On August 28, 1963, Baker spoke at the March on Washington, wearing her World War II uniform, where she told the crowd, “You are on the eve of a complete victory. You can’t go wrong. The world is behind you.”

As further proof of her commitment to racial equality, Baker and her fourth husband, French orchestra leader Jo Bouillon, bought Les Milandes, a fifteenth-century estate in Dordogne, France, where they planned to create a mulitracial and multicultural family. Eventually they adopted twelve children of various cultural, racial, and ethnic backgrounds in a family that Baker would dub her “Rainbow tribe.”

Baker continued to perform throughout her life, and on April 8, 1975, opened in Paris a sold-out musical retrospective of her career. It was to be her last show. On April 14, 1975, she died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Her state funeral was televised throughout France, where she would always be a hero.

Haney, Lynn. Naked at the Feast: A Biography of Josephine Baker. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1981.

Rose, Phyllis. Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in Her Time. New York: Doubleday, 1989.