Photo: AP PhotoJosephine Baker was an American dancer, Foley Berger's Black Venus, an icon of the "roaring 1920s", De Gaulle's spy, opponent of racial segregation, mother of twelve adopted children of the "Rainbow Tribe". On November 30, in the French Pantheon, she joined the figures who indelibly marked French history - Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Victor Hugo, Pierre, Marie Curie. Josephine Baker is the first black woman to receive such an honor
Josephine Baker was born Freda Josephine MacDonald in St. Louis in 1906. She dropped out of school at the age of twelve, lived on the streets, was mischievous, survived on leftovers in trash cans, was a waitress, played on the streets of St. Louis, which "gave life with her talents that took her from the cardboard boxes of the St. Louis slums to the heart of the "Harlem Renaissance." Black culture flourished in Harlem in the 1920s. It was the meeting point of large migrations of American blacks fleeing racist pogroms in the Deep South.
Josephine, who would later remember watching the smoke from burning black houses from the banks of the Mississippi, would arrive in New York with a vaudeville group when she was 13 years old.
She was cast in one of the first black musicals on Broadway in 1921. When she was 19, she was noticed by a talent scout who was looking for entertainers for the black revue La Revue Negre in Paris. Fleeing discrimination, like many black American artists at the time, she went to France - with the promise of earning $1000 a month.
She made her debut on October 2, 1925 in the cult revue La Revue Negre, at the Folie Berge theater in Paris, playing with the colonialist, racist and male sexist fantasies of the audience, which she both shocked and delighted.
Wearing only a string of pearls and a skirt made of 16 rubber bananas, with a snake wrapped around her neck, she danced the Charleston in the performance of "Madness of the Day". Her "savage dance" marked the beginning of the love affair of the then "negrophilic" Paris with the "Bronze Venus", states the BBC.
Scott Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein called her the "Creole Goddess". Ernest Hemingway adored her. Pablo Picasso drew. Jean Cocteau helped her.
The private life of Josephine Baker was initially marked, as the Guardian writes, by affairs with many famous men and women, some say even with Frida Kahlo. She would sometimes walk the Champs Elysées with her pet cheetah.
Josephine Baker's career took a more serious turn later: she learned to speak five languages and as a megastar performed on many international tours, among which was a tour of Central Europe on the Orient Express, during which in April 1929 visited Belgrade who was crazy about jazz at the time.
She became a French citizen in 1937 after marrying industrialist Jean Lyon, a Jew who later suffered under the anti-Semitic laws of the collaborationist Vichy regime.
When the war with Nazi Germany broke out in 1939, Josephine got in touch with the head of the French counter-intelligence services. She used her cabaret performances as a cover to gather intelligence for Charles de Gaulle's headquarters. Messages written in invisible ink on her scores, as well as photographs of German airports hidden in her underwear, she transported across the border and delivered to British agents in Lisbon. To support the French Resistance Movement, she collected or gave the equivalent of 11,2 million dollars from her own pocket.
After escaping to North Africa, she joined the women's group in the Air Force of the French Liberation Army as a second lieutenant. She also sang to soldiers and in 1945 freed detainees and prisoners in Germany.
During a tour of the United States in 1951, due to her opposition to racial segregation, she was targeted by the FBI, declared a communist, and was banned from entering her homeland for a decade. The ban was lifted in 1963 by President John F. Kennedy. When she returned, she spoke at the March on Washington before Martin Luther King's famous "I have a dream" speech. She participated in the desegregation of Las Vegas with Frank Sinatra.
Returning to France, she adopted 12 children from all over the world, creating the "Rainbow Tribe". As a UNICEF ambassador, she visited Yugoslavia when it received Tito. She bought a castle and land in the Dordogne in the town of Castelnaud-la-Chapelle to materialize her ideal of "universal brotherhood".
Towards the end of her life, she fell into financial problems, was evicted from her castle and left without property. She and her children were then offered a place to live by Princess of Monaco Grace Kelly. At the request of the family, she was buried in Monaco.
Now a coffin with soil from America, France and Monaco where the Black Pearl left its mark was placed in the crypt of the Pantheon.
MM/BBC/AP/Guardian/Vreme
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