U.S.-born Josephine Baker given France’s highest honor
Charlie Chaplin congratulates entertainer Josephine Baker after her performance at the charity gala "Le Bal des Petits Lits Blancs," at the Moulin Rouge in Paris, on May 20, 1953. France on Tuesday inducted Baker – Missouri-born cabaret dancer, French Resistance fighter and civil rights leader – into its Pantheon, the first Black woman honored in the final resting place of France's most revered luminaries. (AP photo)
(AP) — France inducted U.S.-born entertainer, anti-Nazi spy and civil rights activist Josephine Baker into the Pantheon on Tuesday, the first Black woman to receive the nation’s highest honor.
Baker’s voice resonated through streets of Paris’ famed Left Bank as recordings from her extraordinary career kicked off an elaborate ceremony at the domed Pantheon monument.
Baker joined other French luminaries honored at the site, including philosopher Voltaire, scientist Marie Curie and writer Victor Hugo.
Military officers carried her cenotaph along a red carpet that stretched for four blocks of cobblestoned streets from the Luxembourg Garden to the Pantheon. Baker’s military medals lay atop the cenotaph, which was draped in the French tricolor flag and contained soils from her birthplace in Missouri, from France, and from her final resting place in Monaco. Her body will stay in Monaco at the request of her family.
French President Emmanuel Macron paid tribute in a speech to “a war hero, fighter, dancer, singer, a Black woman defending Black people but first of all, a woman defending humankind. American and French. Josephine Baker fought so many battles with lightness, freedom, joy.”
Baker was also the first American-born citizen and the first performer to be immortalized into the Pantheon.
She is not only praised for her world-renowned artistic career but also for her active role in the French Resistance during World War II, her actions as a civil rights activist and her humanist values, which she displayed through the adoption of her 12 children from all over the world.
Nine of them attended Tuesday’s ceremony among the 2,000 guests.
The tribute started with Baker’s song “Me revoilà Paris” (“Paris, I’m Back”). The French army choir sang the French Resistance song, prompting strong applause from the public.
Her signature song “J’ai deux amours” (“Two Loves”) was then played by an orchestra accompanying Baker’s voice on the Pantheon plaza.
During a light show displayed on the monument, Baker could be heard saying “I think I am a person who has been adopted by France. It especially developed my humanist values, and that’s the most important thing in my life.”
The homage included Martin Luther King’s famed “I have a dream” speech. Baker was the only woman to speak before him at the 1963 March on Washington.
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Baker became a megastar in the 1930s, especially in France, where she moved in 1925 as she was seeking to flee racism and segregation in the United States.
“The simple fact to have a Black woman entering the pantheon is historic,” Black French scholar Pap Ndiaye, an expert on U.S. minority rights movements, told The Associated Press.
“When she arrived, she was first surprised like so many African Americans who settled in Paris at the same time ... at the absence of institutional racism. There was no segregation ... no lynching. (There was) the possibility to sit at a cafe and be served by a white waiter, the possibility to talk to white people, to (have a) romance with white people,” Ndiaye said.
“It does not mean that racism did not exist in France, but French racism has often been more subtle, not as brutal as the American forms of racism,” he added.
Baker was among several prominent Black Americans, especially artists and writers, who found refuge in France after the two World Wars, including famed writer and intellectual James Baldwin.
They were “aware of the French empire and the brutalities of French colonization, for sure. But they were also having a better life overall than the one they had left behind in the United States,” Ndiaye, who also directs France’s state-run immigration museum, told The Associated Press.
Baker quickly became famous for her banana-skirt dance routines and wowed audiences at Paris theater halls.
Her shows were controversial, Ndiaye stressed, because many anti-colonial activists believed she was “the propaganda for colonization, singing the song that the French wanted her to sing.”
Baker knew well about “the stereotypes that Black women had to face,” he said. “She also distanced herself from these stereotypes with her facial expressions ... a way for her to laugh in some ways at the people watching her.”
“But let’s not forget that when she arrived in France she was only 19, she was almost illiterate ... She had to build her political and racial consciousness,” he said.
Baker became a French citizen after her marriage to industrialist Jean Lion in 1937. The same year, she settled in southwestern France, in the castle of Castelnaud-la-Chapelle.
“Josephine Baker can be considered to be the first Black superstar. She’s like the Rihanna of the 1920s,” said Rosemary Phillips, a Barbados-born performer and co-owner of Baker’s park in southwestern France.
Phillips said one of the ladies who grew up in the castle and met with Baker said: “Can you imagine a Black woman in the 1930s in a chauffeur-driven car — a white chauffeur — who turns up and says, ‘I’d like to buy the 1,000 acres here?’”
In 1938, Baker joined what is today called LICRA, a prominent antiracist league and longtime advocate for her entry in the Pantheon.
The next year, she started to work for France’s counter-intelligence services against Nazis, notably collecting information from German officials who she met at parties. She then joined the French Resistance, using her artistic performances as a cover for spying activities during World War II.
In 1944, Baker became second-lieutenant in a female group in the Air Force of the French Liberation Army of Gen. Charles De Gaulle.
After the war, she got involved in anti-racist politics and civil rights struggle, both in France and in the United States.
Toward the end of her life, she ran into financial trouble, was evicted and lost her properties.
She received support from Princess Grace of Monaco, the U.S.-born actress who offered Baker a place for her and her children to live.