Josephine Baker

Dancer

• Born: June 3, 1906
• Birthplace: St. Louis, Missouri
• Died: April 12, 1975
• Place of death: Paris, France

Entertainer and activist

Baker made important contributions in the fields of entertainment, humanitarianism, and civil rights. During World War II, she served France in the Resistance. She transcended race to become legendary as an entertainer, not merely a black entertainer.

Areas of achievement: Entertainment: vaudeville; Music: pop; Social issues

Early Life

Josephine Baker was born in Saint Louis, Missouri, on June 3, 1906. She was the daughter of Eddi Carson, a vaudeville drummer, and Carrie McDonald, a washerwoman. Her parents were not married and Carson did not stay with Baker and her mother. Baker’s mother had three more children, Richard, Margaret, and Willie Mae. Their father was Arthur Martin. Martin stayed with the family but rarely worked. In order for the family to have enough money to live, the children were put to work. By the time she was eight years old, Baker was working as a domestic for white families. She was shuffled back and forth, sometimes living with the white families for whom she worked, sometimes living with her mother, her siblings and Martin, and occasionally being sent to live with her grandmother and her aunt.

Eventually, the financial situation of the Martin family improved. In 1918, Baker’s aunt Elvara died. Elvara had received a widow’s pension because her husband died in the Spanish American War; she left her money to Baker’s grandmother, who moved in with Baker’s family. The money enabled them to move out of their shack and into a house. Some of the neighborhood children had been to vaudeville performances and played at imitating what they had seen. Baker and her siblings joined in the play, dancing and clowning around. It was in this child’s play that Baker developed the basic dance moves and comic tricks that would become her trademark.

Baker had a difficult relationship with her mother, who believed Eddi Carson had left her because of the child’s birth. Baker believed that while her siblings had been wanted, she was not. When she was thirteen, she left home after a particularly bitter argument with her mother. She obtained a job as a waitress at the Old Chauffer’s Club. A short time later, she married her first husband, Willie Wells, a foundry worker. The marriage quickly ended in divorce. Needing to support herself, Baker joined a group of street musicians called the Jones Family Band and learned to play the trombone. During a Dixie Steppers engagement at the Booker T. Washington Theater, Baker walked in the stage door and asked for a job. She was hired. When the Dixie Steppers left St. Louis, the manager took her along as a dresser.

Life’s Work

Baker toured with the Dixie Steppers as a dresser, but she wanted to be part of the chorus line, so she learned the routines. When one of the dancers was unable to perform, she got her chance onstage. The audience was enthralled by her clowning and her dancing ability. She became a member of the chorus line and eventually the featured dancer. At the beginning of the chorus line performance, she pretended not to be able to do the steps, rolled her eyes and moved clumsily; then at the end, she performed a more complex version of the routine. During the Dixie Steppers tour, she met and married her second husband, railway porter Willie Baker. Although this marriage was also brief, she used the name Baker the rest of her life.

Baker’s big break came when she was hired for the chorus line of Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake’s Shuffle Along (1921), the first all-African American musical to play on Broadway. Next, she appeared as one of the principal dancers in Sissle and Blake’s Chocolate Dandies (1924), which played at the Cotton Club. After Chocolate Dandies closed, she stayed in New York and performed at the Plantation Club, where she danced and also worked as an understudy to Ethel Waters. In the late summer of 1925, Caroline Dudley Regan came to the club to offer Waters a role in La Revue nègre (the black revue), which Dudley Regan was taking to Paris. Waters was not interested in the offer, but Dudley Regan remembered Baker’s performance in Shuffle Along and hired her as a dancer.

La Revue nègre opened at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées to an appreciative audience. Baker’s “Danse sauvage” with partner Joe Alex was an absolute sensation. Paris was fascinated by Baker and she loved Paris, which she discovered was free of the racism that African Americans faced in the United States. In 1926, she left La Revue nègre to star in La Folie du jour at the Folies Bergères. It was here that she first appeared in her banana skirt costume. During the next years, Baker enjoyed enormous success as an entertainer in France. While still performing at the Folies Bergères, she recorded her first songs and opened her own nightclub, Chez Joséphine, in Montmartre. In 1927, Pepito (Giuseppe) Abatino became her manager. Her career flourished under his guidance. She made more recordings, toured, and appeared in Les Sirènes des tropiques (1927; Siren of the Tropics), a feature-length film. Baker became the highest-paid entertainer in Europe. During her career, she continually reinvented her stage image, always moving further from the exoticism of her original primitive African persona and toward a more and more elegant, sophisticated, and refined image. In 1935, she returned to the United States to star in a Ziegfeld Follies production. Her performance was poorly received by a white audience that refused to accept an African American performer doing anything but a stereotypical “black” performance. The reviews were filled with cutting racist remarks that hurt her bitterly. She returned to France. In 1937, Baker married Jean Lion, a French industrialist; the marriage gave her French citizenship.

During World War II, Baker toured and entertained both civilians and soldiers. She also played an active role in the French Resistance. Taking advantage of her opportunity to travel as an entertainer, she smuggled messages for the Resistance and also served as a sublieutenant in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. In 1946, the French government gave her the Medal of the Resistance with Rosette and made her a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur. On June 3, 1947, she married her fourth husband, Jo Bouillon, a French orchestra leader with whom she had recorded in 1944. She and Bouillon purchased the chateau Les Milandes. In 1948, she toured the United States and was confronted with racism once again. Although she was an international star and a French citizen recognized for her contribution to the war effort, she was refused hotel accommodations because of her skin color. In 1949, she returned to France, where she opened a new revue at the Folies Bergères.

Baker was intensely concerned with racial inequality in the United States. Living in Paris, she enjoyed acceptance as a human being; her skin color was not a factor. During the 1950’s and 1960’s, she made several trips to the United States to participate in the Civil Rights movement. She participated in the 1963 March on Washington. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) declared May 20 Josephine Baker Day in honor of her efforts. At this time, Baker also began adopting children of different races and religions, eventually adopting twelve whom she called her “Rainbow Tribe.” She believed that all people could live together peacefully and intended her Rainbow Tribe to prove it, even opening Les Milandes to the public. However, in the late 1960’s, an aging Baker found it difficult to support her large family as her bookings decreased. She also began to suffer from health problems and was evicted from Les Milandes in 1969. Princess Grace of Monaco provided the family a villa in Monaco.

In 1973, Baker performed once again in the United States. In this performance at Carnegie Hall, she finally was recognized for her talent as an entertainer. She received a standing ovation as soon as she appeared onstage. Baker’s last performances took place at the Bobino Theater in Paris in April of 1975. She performed to a full house and received glowing reviews. Two days after her opening night, she suffered a stroke; she died on April 12, 1975. She was given a state funeral, and some twenty thousand people attended.

Significance

Baker was one of the most famous international stars of the twentieth century. She played a significant role in opening the field of mainstream entertainment to African Americans. As her career progressed, she refused to be limited to stereotypical black performances; stunning satin gowns and jewels replaced the banana skirts and feathers, and ballads and more elegant dance moves took the place of clowning and jerky, angular movements. When not onstage, she worked to encourage tolerance among all people. Whenever she was in the United States, she actively tried to draw attention to segregation and discrimination in public facilities and entertainment venues. She supported the Civil Rights movement by participating in the March on Washington in 1963.

Bibliography

Abraham, John Kirby. In Search of Josephine Baker. London: Minerva Press, 2001. Biography of Baker based on interviews with friends, colleagues, and associates. The author interviewed Baker in 1975.

Baker, Jean-Claude, and Chris Chase. Josephine Baker: The Hungry Heart. New York: Random House, 1993. Written by one of Baker’s adopted children, this biography contains many personal anecdotes and memories. Covers her rise from a black vaudeville performer to an international star, her need to continually reinvent herself, and her sexuality.

Baker, Josephine, and Jo Bouillon. Josephine. Translated by Mariana Fitzpatrick. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. Autobiography of Baker compiled and published after her death by her fourth husband, Bouillon.

Jules-Rosette, Bennetta. Josephine Baker in Art and Life: The Icon and the Image. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007. Concentrates on Baker from a cultural viewpoint, the stage persona she created, her humanitarian activist role, and her work in the French Resistance. Well illustrated, with a chronology of her career.

Rose, Phyllis. Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in Her Time. New York: Doubleday, 1989. Recounts Baker’s life and career in terms of cultural context. Discusses the effects of racism and the Civil Rights movement, French attitudes toward African Americans, and the French fascination with the exotic. Offers considerable analysis of Baker’s motivation and of cultural movements of the time.

Wood, Ean. The Josephine Baker Story. London: Sanctuary, 2002. Very thorough coverage of Baker’s personal life and her career.