Josephine Baker

Freda Josephine McDonald was born on 3 June 1906 in St. Louis, Missouri, into deep poverty, dropping out of school around age twelve to work as a domestic servant and later busking on street corners to support her family. She witnessed the brutal 1917 East St. Louis race riots as a child, an experience of racial terror she later cited as formative to her lifelong commitment to fighting racism, both in America and, eventually, from abroad.

Baker began performing professionally as a teenager, joining vaudeville and touring Black theatre circuits before landing a role in the chorus line of the groundbreaking all-Black Broadway revue Shuffle Along in 1921. In 1925 she travelled to Paris to join La Revue Nègre, a show introducing African-American music and dance to French audiences, and her performance — energetic, comedic and daringly physical — made her an overnight sensation in a city far more receptive to a Black American performer than the segregated United States had been.

Baker became one of the most celebrated entertainers in Europe through the late 1920s and 1930s, headlining at the Folies Bergère and becoming closely associated with the 'Jazz Age' cultural explosion in Paris. She adopted French citizenship in 1937, marrying French industrialist Jean Lion, and by the outbreak of the Second World War had become a genuine Parisian celebrity with connections across French society.

When Germany invaded France in 1940, Baker was recruited by French military intelligence, initially as an 'honourable correspondent,' gathering information at the parties and embassies she attended in her capacity as a famous entertainer, where diplomats and officials often spoke freely in her presence, underestimating her. She smuggled intelligence written in invisible ink on her sheet music and pinned to her underwear, exploiting her celebrity status and the reluctance of border guards to search a famous performer closely.

Baker continued this work throughout the war, touring to entertain troops across North Africa and the Middle East while continuing intelligence work for the Free French forces under Charles de Gaulle. For her wartime service she was awarded the Croix de Guerre, the Resistance Medal, and was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour — an extraordinary set of honours for a foreign-born entertainer, reflecting the genuine value of her contribution.

In the postwar decades Baker became increasingly engaged in civil rights activism on both sides of the Atlantic, refusing to perform for segregated audiences during her American tours and becoming the only official female speaker at the 1963 March on Washington, appearing in her French military uniform alongside Martin Luther King Jr. She also adopted twelve children of different ethnic and national backgrounds, whom she called her 'Rainbow Tribe,' explicitly intending to demonstrate that children of different races could be raised together in harmony. Baker died in Paris in 1975, just days after a triumphant career retrospective performance, and in 2021 became the first Black woman inducted into the Panthéon, France's highest honour for its most revered citizens.