Paris made Josephine Baker a star long before Broadway would
Chorus-line comic Josephine Baker sailed to France at nineteen and opened La Revue nègre on October 2, 1925. Within a year her Folies Bergère banana-skirt act defined Jazz Age Paris—while she still recalled being only background noise in Shuffle Along.
Freda Josephine McDonald was born June 3, 1906 in St. Louis. Poverty meant laundry work by eight, street dancing near Union Station’s yards, and brief teenage marriages; she kept William Howard Baker’s surname after their 1925 divorce even as larger stages pulled her away. Vaudeville and Harlem’s Plantation Club led to touring and Broadway chorus spots in Shuffle Along and The Chocolate Dandies, where she stole laughs—and routines from mime Johnny Hudgins—from the end of the line until both shows closed.
Caroline Dudley’s Revue Nègre carried her to the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, opening October 2, 1925. Erotic freer movement and near-nudity shocked and sold out Europe; the 1926 Folies Bergère appearance in an artificial-banana skirt became an icon of the Roaring Twenties and Art Deco’s hunger for African-inspired forms. Artists nicknamed her Black Venus, Black Pearl, and Bronze Venus; Hemingway praised her as uniquely electrifying among women he had met, Picasso sketched her, and a pet cheetah named Chiquita sometimes scattered the orchestra. She starred in the 1927 silent Siren of the Tropics, the first major film led by a Black woman.
Marriage to industrialist Jean Lion in 1937 brought French citizenship after she renounced the U.S. During World War II she aided the French Resistance and British and American intelligence—work detailed publicly only after French files opened in 2020—earning the Resistance Medal, Croix de Guerre, and Legion of Honour knighthood from de Gaulle. She refused segregated U.S. audiences, adopted twelve children she called the Rainbow Tribe, and sang of two loves: her country and Paris. On November 30, 2021 France inducted her into the Panthéon, the first Black woman so honored, though she remains buried in Monaco Cemetery.
Source: Josephine Baker
