Josephine Baker

Freda Josephine McDonald was born in Saint Louis, Missouri, on the third of June 1906. She left school at twelve, married briefly at thirteen, and supported herself as a street performer in the segregated St. Louis of the 1910s. She joined the chorus of the all-Black touring revue Shuffle Along at sixteen.

She moved to Paris in 1925 with the Revue Nègre troupe. Her opening performance at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on the second of October 1925 — the danse sauvage routine she performed in a single-feather skirt — made her the most-photographed entertainer in Europe by the end of 1926. She headlined the Folies Bergère for a decade and starred in three French films, becoming the first African American to star in a major motion picture (the 1934 Zouzou).

She served in the French Resistance from 1940 through the Liberation. She was inducted into the Free French Forces by Charles de Gaulle's emissaries, used her continued public appearances across Vichy France and German-occupied territory as cover for the transmission of intelligence to Allied command, and personally smuggled documents written in invisible ink on her sheet music across Nazi checkpoints. She was awarded the Croix de Guerre, the Rosette of the Resistance, and was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour by de Gaulle himself in 1961.

She adopted twelve children of multiple races and religions in the 1950s and 1960s — what she called her Rainbow Tribe — and raised them at the Château des Milandes in the Dordogne as a personal demonstration of multi-racial coexistence.

She spoke at the March on Washington in August 1963 — the only woman to address the assembled crowd from the platform — wearing her Free French uniform.

She died at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris on the twelfth of April 1975, age sixty-eight. In November 2021 her remains were interred at the Panthéon — the first African American, the first woman of color, and the first entertainer of any background so honored by the French state.

She is honored here as the dancer, the Resistance agent, and the first African American to lie at the Panthéon.