Josephine Baker: Banana Skirt Star, Resistance Spy and Civil Rights Voice

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Josephine Baker was born Freda Josephine McDonald in St. Louis in June 1906. Her mother spent six weeks in a whites-only hospital ward after the birth, and the birth certificate names the father only as Edward, leading biographers to suspect her mother's wealthy white employer. By eight she was a live-in domestic, and one employer plunged her hands into boiling water for using too much soap. At 11 she witnessed the 1917 East St. Louis race violence, and by 12 she was dancing on street corners for change. Married and divorced by 14, she wed William Howard Baker at 15 and kept his surname. In 1921 she joined the chorus of Shuffle Along and turned her spot at the end of the line into a comic showcase by crossing her eyes and fumbling steps.

In 1925, at 19, she sailed to Paris with La Revue Nègre, then wore her famous banana skirt at the Folies Bergère and walked a cheetah named Chiquita in a diamond collar. She became the first Black woman to star in a major motion picture with Siren of the Tropics. After a hostile reception at the 1936 Ziegfeld Follies, she married a French industrialist and renounced her American citizenship. In World War II she gathered intelligence at diplomatic events for French intelligence and carried notes pinned inside her underwear across borders. Charles de Gaulle made her a Knight of the Legion of Honor. In 1951 she forced a Miami club to integrate, and in 1963 she was the only woman to speak at the March on Washington.

• She studied the mime Johnny Hudgins from theater balconies and copied his timing in her own act.
• In North Africa she nearly died after a miscarriage led to peritonitis, sepsis, and a hysterectomy.
• She performed for Allied troops on condition that no soldier be charged admission.
• She adopted 12 children she called the Rainbow Tribe, and when her chateau was lost Princess Grace of Monaco paid for a villa.
• She died days after a 1975 Paris revue marking 50 years on stage and entered the Panthéon in 2021.