Josephine Baker: The St. Louis Girl Who Became the Most Famous Woman in Paris

Josephine Baker was born Freda Josephine McDonald on June 3, 1906, in St. Louis, Missouri. Her father left before she grew up. Her mother was a washerwoman. The family frequently went hungry. At eight years old, Baker was working as a servant in the homes of wealthy white families to help put food on the table.

Nineteen years later, she was the highest-paid entertainer in Europe. The story of how she got from one place to the other is not a simple rise-to-fame narrative. It’s a story about what America was in 1906, what Paris was in 1925, and what one specific person did with the gap between those two things.

What She Left Behind

Baker grew up during the East St. Louis race riot of 1917, when white mobs attacked Black neighborhoods across the river from St. Louis. Estimates put the death toll between 100 and 200 people, with thousands displaced. She was eleven years old. She later said she could still see herself standing on the west bank of the Mississippi, watching the glow of burning Black homes lighting the sky.

So, she had already started dancing on street corners for coins. By fifteen she was performing with a traveling theatre group. She married young, twice, and kept the last name of her second husband. Meanwhile, she fought her way onto the chorus line of a touring production of Shuffle Along, one of the first major Broadway musicals written and performed by Black artists. She made herself impossible to ignore by improvising comedy bits, crossing her eyes and stumbling while the other dancers performed straight. In 1925, someone offered her a spot in a revue heading to Paris. She was nineteen years old. She said yes.

Paris in 1925

La Revue Nègre opened at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris in October 1925. Baker’s performance was an immediate sensation. Paris in the 1920s, the city of the Années Folles, the crazy years, was hungry for the American jazz culture that France associated with vitality and modernity. Baker embodied everything Paris wanted at that moment: extraordinary physicality, comic energy, a quality of freedom and abandon that European audiences found irresistible.

She was signed immediately for her own show at the Folies-Bergère. The banana skirt dance she performed there, the number that became her most famous image, was designed by the show’s creators and played into European fantasies about Africa that were reductive and colonial. Baker’s relationship to this is genuinely complicated. She worked within the framework she had been given, dominated it on her own terms, and spent the rest of her career systematically dismantling the limitations that framework tried to place on her.

Within a few years, couture gowns replaced the banana skirts. Her songs became hits across Europe. Films followed. Additionally, she learned French, German, Italian, and Portuguese. French citizenship came in 1937. By any measure, she had become the most famous woman in Paris.

The Spy

When Germany occupied France in 1940, Josephine Baker joined the French Resistance. This is not a minor footnote. As one of the most recognizable people in Europe, she was both an unlikely and an effective operative. Her status as a celebrity and touring performer gave her cover to travel across Europe and North Africa. At parties with German and Italian officials, she listened carefully and reported what she heard. Intelligence documents written in invisible ink went out on her sheet music, because nobody would search the papers of a famous jazz singer carefully. Additional notes in invisible ink were carried on her undergarments, counting on officials not to search her body.

She also performed for Free French forces in North Africa throughout the war, contracting near-fatal pneumonia in 1941 that hospitalized her for a year and a half. She continued anyway. After the war, General Charles de Gaulle personally awarded her the Croix de Guerre, the Resistance Medal, and named her a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. She wore her French military uniform with those medals on stage for the rest of her life.

The Rainbow Tribe and the Return to America

In the 1950s, Baker purchased a chateau in southwestern France called Les Milandes and began adopting children from countries around the world. She eventually adopted twelve children of different nationalities and races, calling them her Rainbow Tribe. The project was, as she described it, an experiment in brotherhood: proof that children of any origin could be raised together in harmony.

Baker also returned to the United States. She refused to perform for segregated audiences, which forced venues to integrate for her shows. The NAACP named May 20 Josephine Baker Day in 1951 after she became a lifetime member. At the March on Washington in August 1963, she was one of the very few women allowed to address the crowd. Wearing her French military uniform, she told 250,000 people: “You know, friends, that I do not lie to you when I tell you I have walked into the palaces of kings and queens and into the houses of presidents. And much more. But I could not walk into a hotel in America and get a cup of coffee, and that made me mad.”

After Martin Luther King Jr.‘s assassination in 1968, Coretta Scott King asked Baker to consider taking over leadership of the civil rights movement. Baker spent days thinking about it. She ultimately declined, saying her children were too young to lose their mother.

The Last Show

In the spring of 1975, Baker staged a show at the Bobino Theatre in Paris marking 50 years since her arrival in France. The audience included Diana Ross, Sophia Loren, and Mick Jagger. The reviews were ecstatic. Two days after opening night, she slipped into a coma in her sleep. Baker died on April 12, 1975, at 68. That morning, she had received a full page of press reviews before losing consciousness.

In 2021, France inducted her into the Panthéon, the mausoleum in Paris reserved for the country’s greatest figures. Baker became the first Black woman to receive the honor. Her body remains in Monaco, where she had been living, and a cenotaph in the Panthéon bears her name. She had two loves, she once sang: her country and Paris. One of them treated her accordingly. The other eventually caught up, in its own way, half a century after she was gone.