Josephine Baker Google Doodle Honors Jazz Age Icon Highlights Her Civil Rights Work
Lutero Chaloux
During her early career, Baker was among the most celebrated performers to headline the revues of the Folies Bergre in Paris. Her performance in its 1927 revue Un vent de folie caused a sensation in the city. Her costume, consisting only of a short skirt of artificial bananas and a beaded necklace, became an iconic image and a symbol both of the Jazz Age and the Roaring Twenties.
Josephine Baker Google Doodle honors Jazz Age icon highlights her civil rights work
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Baker was celebrated by artists and intellectuals of the era, who variously dubbed her the "Black Venus", the "Black Pearl", the "Bronze Venus", and the "Creole Goddess".[4] Born in St. Louis, Missouri, she renounced her U.S. citizenship and became a French national after her marriage to French industrialist Jean Lion in 1937.[5] She raised her children in France.
Baker aided the French Resistance during World War II.[6] After the war, she was awarded the Resistance Medal by the French Committee of National Liberation, the Croix de Guerre by the French military, and was named a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour by General Charles de Gaulle.[7] Baker sang: "I have two loves: my country and Paris."[8]
Baker, who refused to perform for segregated audiences in the United States, is noted for her contributions to the civil rights movement. In 1968, she was offered unofficial leadership in the movement in the United States by Coretta Scott King, following Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. After thinking it over, Baker declined the offer out of concern for the welfare of her children.[9][10][11]
On November 30, 2021, she was inducted into the Panthon in Paris, the first black woman to receive one of the highest honors in France.[12] As her resting place remains in Monaco Cemetery, a cenotaph was installed in vault 13 of the crypt in the Panthon.[13]
Josephine McDonald spent her early life on 212 Targee Street (known by some St. Louis residents as Johnson Street) in the Chestnut Valley neighborhood of St. Louis, a racially mixed low-income area near Union Station, consisting mainly of rooming houses, brothels, and apartments without indoor plumbing.[9] She was poorly dressed, hungry as a child, and developed street smarts playing in the railroad yards of Union Station.[17]
Her mother married Arthur Martin, "a kind but perpetually unemployed man", with whom she had a son and two more daughters.[18] She took in laundry to make ends meet, and, at eight years old, Josephine began working as a live-in domestic for white families in St. Louis.[19] One woman abused her, burning Josephine's hands when the young girl put too much soap in the laundry.[20]
I can still see myself standing on the west bank of the Mississippi looking over into East St. Louis and watching the glow of the burning of Negro homes lighting the sky. We children stood huddled together in bewilderment ... frightened to death with the screams of the Negro families running across this bridge with nothing but what they had on their backs as their worldly belongings... So with this vision I ran and ran and ran...[22]
By age 12, she had dropped out of school.[23] At 13, she worked as a waitress at the Old Chauffeur's Club at 3133 Pine Street. She also lived as a street child in the slums of St. Louis, sleeping in cardboard shelters, scavenging for food in garbage cans,[24] making a living with street-corner dancing. It was at the Old Chauffeur's Club that Josephine met Willie Wells, whom she married at age 13, but the marriage lasted less than a year. Following her divorce from Wells, she found work with a street performance group called the Jones Family Band.[25]
In her teens, she struggled to have a healthy relationship with her mother, who opposed her becoming an entertainer and scolded her for not tending to her second husband, William Howard Baker, whom she had married in 1921, at age 15.[26] She soon left him when her vaudeville troupe was booked into a New York City venue. They divorced in 1925, during a period when her career success was beginning. Still, she continued to use his last name professionally for the rest of her life.[9] Though Baker was often on the road, returning with gifts and money for her mother and younger half-sister, larger career opportunities drew her farther afield, to France.[27]
Baker's unrelenting badgering of a local show manager led to her recruitment for the St. Louis Chorus vaudeville act. At the age of 13, she headed to New York City[22] during the Harlem Renaissance and performed at the Plantation Club, Florence Mills's old stomping ground. After several auditions, she secured a role in the chorus line of a touring production of the groundbreaking and hugely successful Broadway revue "Shuffle Along" (1921)[28] that helped bring public attention to Florence Mills, Paul Robeson, and Adelaide Hall.[29][30]
In "Shuffle Along", Baker was a dancer at the end of a chorus line. Fearing she might be overshadowed by the others, she used her position to introduce a hint of comedy into her routine, making her stand out from her fellow dancers. She began in "Shuffle Along" with one of the U.S. touring companies, but, once she came of age, she was transferred to the Broadway production, where she remained for several months, until the show closed, in 1923. Next, Baker was cast in "The Chocolate Dandies", a revue that opened on September 1, 1924. Again, she was relegated to the chorus line. The show ran for 96 performances, finally closing in November 1925.
Baker sailed to Paris in 1925 and opened on October 2 in "la Revue ngre [fr]" at Thtre des Champs-lyses.[31][32] She was 19 at the time. In a 1974 interview with The Guardian, she explained that her first big break came in this bustling European city. "No, I didn't get my first break on Broadway. I was only in the chorus in 'Shuffle Along' and 'Chocolate Dandies.' I became famous first in France in the twenties. I just couldn't stand America and I was one of the first coloured Americans to move to Paris. Oh yes, Bricktop was there as well. Me and her were the only two, and we had a marvellous time. Of course, everyone who was anyone knew Bricky. And they got to know Miss Baker as well."[33]
In Paris, she became an instant success for her erotic dancing and for appearing practically nude onstage. After a successful tour of Europe, she broke her contract and returned to France in 1926 to star at the Folies Bergre, setting the standard for her future acts.[9]
Baker performed the Danse Sauvage, wearing little more than a skirt of strung-together artificial bananas. Her success coincided with the 1925 Exposition des Arts Dcoratifs, which gave birth to the term "Art Deco", as well as a renewed interest in non-Western art forms, including those of African origin, which Baker would represent. In later shows in Paris, she was often accompanied on stage by her pet cheetah, "Chiquita", donning a diamond collar. Chiquita frequently escaped into the orchestra pit, terrorizing the musicians and adding another element of excitement to the show.[9]
After a while, Baker became the most successful American entertainer in France. Ernest Hemingway called her "the most sensational woman anyone ever saw."[34][35] The author spent hours talking with her in Parisian bars. Picasso depicted her alluring beauty. Jean Cocteau became friendly with her and helped vault her to international stardom.[33] Baker endorsed a "Bakerfix" hair gel, as well as bananas, shoes, and cosmetics, among other products.[36]
In 1929, Baker became the first African-American star to visit Yugoslavia, which she included on a tour through Central Europe via the Orient Express. In Belgrade, she performed at Luxor Balkanska, then the city's most luxurious venue. In a nod to local culture, she included a Pirot kilim in her routine, and donated some of the show's proceeds to poor children of Serbia. In Zagreb, adoring crowds greeted her at the train station, but opposition from local clergy and morality police led to the cancellation of some of her shows.[37]
During her travels in Yugoslavia, Baker was accompanied by "Count" Giuseppe Pepito Abatino.[37] At the start of her career in France, Abatino, a Sicilian former stonemason who passed himself off as a count, persuaded her to let him manage her.[38] He became not only Baker's manager, but her lover as well. The two could not marry because she was not yet divorced from her second husband, Willie Baker.[39]
During this period, she released her most successful song, "J'ai deux amours" (1931).[40] The song expresses the sentiment that "I have two loves, my country and Paris." In a 2007 book, Tim Bergfelder, Sue Harris, and Sarah Street claimed that "by the 1930's, Baker's assimilation into French popular culture had been completed by her association with the song."[41] She starred in four films, which found success only in Europe: the silent film Siren of the Tropics (1927), Zouzou (1934) and Princesse Tam Tam (1935). She starred in Fausse Alerte in 1940.[42] Bergfelder, Harris, and Street wrote that the silent film Siren of the Tropics "rehearses the 'primitive-to-Parisienne' narrative that would become the staple of Baker's cinema career, and exploited in particular her comic stage persona based on loose-limbed athleticism and artful clumsiness."[41] The sound films "Zouzou" (1934) and "Princesse Tam Tam" were both star vehicles for Baker.[43]
Under the management of Abatino, Baker's stage and public persona, as well as her singing voice, were transformed. In 1934, she took the lead in a revival of Jacques Offenbach's opera La crole, which premiered in December of that year for a six-month run at the Thtre Marigny on the Champs-lyses of Paris. In preparation for her performances, she went through months of training with a vocal coach. In the words of Shirley Bassey, who has cited Baker as her primary influence, "... she went from a petite danseuse sauvage with a decent voice to la grande diva magnifique... I swear in all my life I have never seen, and probably never shall see again, such a spectacular singer and performer."[44]
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