Inauspicious beginnings
This remarkable story began in St Louis, Missouri in 1906, with the birth of Freda Josephine McDonald. Her mother, Carrie, seems to have been adopted by a formerly enslaved couple of African and Native American descent. Her father’s identity has never been decisively confirmed.
The family was not wealthy. “We were all so very hungry and cold at home,” she later recalled, explaining that she started dancing to keep warm. At eight years old she left school to work as a domestic servant for white families, who did not treat her kindly.
As a young teenager, Josephine was a fan of dance shows. She learned her craft dancing on the streets before working her way into a vaudeville troupe. At around this time, when she was just 13 years old, she married her first husband, an older man named Willie Wells.
Because she was under 15, the wedding was not legal under Missouri law, though neither she nor her mother (who consented to the marriage) realised this at the time. Perhaps marriage appealed to Josephine as a way to escape the hardships of life at home. Whatever her motives, the union was turbulent and soon imploded – reportedly following Wells’ discovery that she had lied about carrying his child. While still only 15 years old, she married William Howard Baker; though she soon left him, and they later divorced, she kept his surname for the rest of her life.
Baker made her entrance to her first Paris show practically in nude, carried onto the stage upside down and wearing only a pink flamingo feather
In 1922 or 1923 she joined the cast of Shuffle Along. First staged in New York in 1921, this groundbreaking musical revue had been the first Broadway show written, produced and performed by black artists.
It was a smash hit, launching the careers of luminaries including Paul Robeson. In fact, it’s been credited with sparking the Harlem Renaissance – the flourishing of black American culture and politics that burgeoned in its namesake New York City neighbourhood during the 1920s and 1930s.
Baker had a relatively minor part in Shuffle Along, appearing at the end of a chorus line, but found a way to stand out by making her mark with comedy. “Josephine milked her role as end girl for all it was worth,” wrote biographer Ean Wood. “She tripped over her own feet, she went knock-kneed, she crossed her eyes and she grinned her goofy grin, all the time dancing rhythmically and inventively around the music. Audiences loved her. And, of course, the rest of the chorus line hated her… she was getting all of the attention.”
After opening night, one critic wrote of Baker’s performance: “One of the chorus girls is without question the most limber lady… Her name may be printed somewhere in the programme – if it is, I can’t find it – but it should be placed outside in lights. The knees of this phenomenon are without joints… I’ve seen nothing funnier.” Before long, everyone would know the name Josephine Baker.
In 1925, Baker arrived in Paris. She had been booked to perform in the city by Caroline Dudley Reagan, a well-connected impresario who wanted to showcase the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance for French audiences. Baker’s first show in the capital was La Revue Nègre, staged at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, opening in October 1925. Baker made her entrance practically nude, being carried onto the stage upside down and wearing only a pink flamingo feather. She then commenced her frenzied dancing, leaping and shaking her hips – one minute contorting her body to mimic animal movements, the next letting out wild screeches as she did the Charleston and pulled comical faces to the beat of drums.
“There seemed to emanate from her violently shuddering body, her bold dislocations, her springing movements, a gushing stream of rhythm,” one French critic observed. “It was she who led the spellbound drummer and the fascinated saxophonist… there was a wild splendour and magnificent animality.”
Shocking and spellbinding
Paris had never seen anything like it, and Baker’s performance sent shockwaves through the French capital. Before long, she was engaged for a residency at the famous Folies Bergère music hall, introducing the act with which she became synonymous: dancing in a skirt of bananas.
In the 1920s, a craze for black culture was sweeping Paris. The First World War had brought African and black American soldiers to the city, and with them came jazz music and dance. Meanwhile, French artists were finding inspiration in African art and sculpture. For French bohemians, these cultural forms were excitingly ‘primitive’, representing a simpler way of life that some found appealing in the wake of the brutal conflict. Of course, this so-called ‘negrophilia’ drew on reductive and racist stereotypes about African culture and people.
Josephine Baker’s role within this movement remains a matter of debate. Some argue that her performances reinforced prejudiced views: she played the stereotypical ‘wild savage’ on stage, while allowing largely white audiences to view the black female body as a sexual object. Others, meanwhile, suggest that these were the very prejudices Baker subverted on stage, rendering such stereotypes ridiculous with her physical comedy that incorporated silly faces and exaggerated movements – all while profiting handsomely.
Whatever her understanding of such debates, this sensational act catapulted Josephine Baker to wealth and fame, and earned her a place in history as the world’s first black superstar. She opened her own cabaret the year after her arrival in Paris, and indulged her great passion for animals by amassing an exotic menagerie. Baker could sometimes be seen walking along the streets of the capital with her pet cheetah, Chiquita, who wore a diamond-studded collar.
Scores of French women emulated her short hairstyle, kept in place with ‘Bakerfix’ hair gel. Fashion designers fought to dress her and, when she went out in public, fans crowded around to request her autograph. She won many famous admirers, too. Ernest Hemingway described Baker as “the most sensational woman anyone ever saw”, while an infatuated Pablo Picasso painted her – and dubbed her “the Nefertiti of now”. She also took up film acting, appearing in four major movies between 1927 and 1940.
In person, Baker was warm, generous and down to earth. “Josephine, hospitable and unassuming, loves everyone she works with,” recalled her friend Marcel Sauvage, a French journalist who compiled her memoir from a series of interviews. “There is not one of her colleagues, young or old, for whom she will not be a trusted, attentive friend and often a form of salvation.”
Between 1928 and 1930, Baker toured in 25 countries across Europe and the Americas. Though she was often met with screaming adulation, in some places religious groups petitioned against her. “In Vienna they rang all the city’s bells at full peal to warn the churchgoers that… the demon of immorality… had arrived,” she recalled later.
Incorporating singing into her performances, around 1930 she recorded the patriotic song ‘J’ai deux amours’, which became her anthem. In this song, Baker sang of her “two loves”: her country, and the city of Paris.
Baker’s assimilation into that culture was complete in 1937 when she married a French industrialist and became a French citizen. Like other black Americans, she felt a sense of freedom in a country without segregation and where racism was less overt. And she soon demonstrated her love for France in a far more impactful way.
Celebrity spy
Baker was appalled by the racist politics of Nazi Germany and, after the outbreak of the Second World War, realised that she was in a unique position to help. “I only asked for one thing, the smallest thing,” she said: “to serve the country to which I would always owe a debt of gratitude, even if I had to give my life.”
Her celebrity status paved the way for spying. Baker had access to many influential international admirers, including ambassadors, politicians and military men. She courted them all, gathering intelligence that she passed back to the French, all while playing to perfection the role of naïve dancer – nobody guessed what she was really up to.
She carried messages written in invisible ink, or simply pinned notes to her clothes, trusting that nobody would dare to search such a celebrity
On one of her first missions, Baker was able to leverage her friendship with Miki Sawada, the wife of the Japanese ambassador to France, to gather intelligence about Japan’s intentions. She learned that Japan did not plan to maintain a coalition with the Allies, as it had during the First World War – critical information that was immediately reported back to British authorities.
Her war effort didn’t end with espionage. Baker volunteered at a Paris feeding centre for Belgian refugees, and sent thousands of letters and packages to soldiers at the front. Before the war she had gained her pilot’s licence, and she used that skill to deliver Red Cross supplies in her private plane.
When France fell to German forces in 1940, Baker committed herself still more deeply to the cause, and began working for the French Resistance. She turned her grand chateau in the Dordogne into a centre for Resistance activities, and secreted a forbidden radio on the property. When Germans turned up to search the chateau, she bravely convinced them to leave. She also leveraged contacts to secure safe passage out of France for several Jewish refugees.
In his 2022 book The Flame of Resistance, Damien Lewis details her wartime service, revealing how Baker received and passed on crucial intelligence via other members of the Resistance – including information about Luftwaffe signals and the location of German airbases. Working with Jacques Abtey, the head of French intelligence with whom she collaborated throughout the war, Baker made plans to smuggle this information into neutral Portugal, from where it could be passed to the British.
Baker and Abtey – whose relationship developed into a romantic one – operated together, transcribing the intelligence onto her music scores in invisible ink. Baker approached the Brazilian ambassador – another useful acquaintance – to organise a dance tour of Brazil that would necessitate her travelling via Portugal, providing the perfect cover story for their mission. Abtey posed as her tour secretary, and the intrepid pair were thus able to travel to Lisbon and there hand over the intelligence.
The cloak of fame
That mission, like others she completed during the war – sometimes working alone – relied on Baker’s fame to serve as a cloak. On occasions she carried messages written in invisible ink and hidden in her luggage, but at other times she simply pinned notes to her clothes, trusting that nobody would dare to search such a celebrity. Her bravery was astonishing, and she was clearly prepared to risk her life for the cause.
She was forced to dive for cover as German bombers flew overhead, and was rescued from the sea after a plane in which she was flying ditched
Realising that intelligence from Spain was scant, she took it upon herself to organise a tour of that country, during which she gathered information. She even managed to cultivate a friendship with Nicolás Franco, brother of the Spanish Nationalist dictator General Francisco Franco, drawing him into conversations that she later wrote up in her hotel room, smuggling the resulting notes out of the country hidden in her underwear. Then, from 1941, she based herself in Morocco, where she continued to work for the Resistance alongside Abtey. When she fell seriously ill there, she turned her hospital ward into an intelligence hub.
Having recovered her health, she toured military bases relentlessly, delivering performances to boost troops’ morale. To do this, she travelled all over north Africa, often in dangerous circumstances. On one occasion she was forced to dive for cover as German bombers flew overhead; on another, she had to be rescued from the sea after the plane in which she was flying ditched. She refused to accept payment for this work. “I was singing for my comrades in arms,” she explained. “I wasn’t singing for money.”
After the war ended, Baker visited Germany, where she performed for the survivors of a concentration camp. “While the poor souls there… waited to be transported out of the camp, someone needed to try and distract them, restore their hope, to console them, or at least save them first from despair,” she explained. “I volunteered.”
Baker’s efforts during the war were recognised by French authorities, and she was later awarded the Resistance medal and the Croix de Guerre, as well as being made a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur. But her fight was not yet over.
Raging against racism
Travelling to the US after the war, Baker was incensed by the racism and segregation she experienced. “Tell me, what have we achieved?” she said. “I wanted to serve in the war, as best I could, against the Germans, because of their race policy. And that policy, I found it again, more insidious, more hideous, perhaps, among the people who claimed to fight against it.”
Baker was outspoken in her disgust, writing articles, joining rallies and refusing to perform for segregated audiences. She spoke at the March on Washington alongside Martin Luther King on 28 August 1963 – the day on which he delivered his famous ‘I have a dream’ speech. “Without unity there cannot be any victory,” she told the crowd. “Continue on – you can’t go wrong – the world is behind you.”
After King’s assassination in 1968, his widow reportedly approached Baker to become the unofficial leader of the civil rights movement – but Josephine declined, believing that her children needed her. By this point, Baker had married for a fourth time, and back in France adopted 12 children from around the world, calling this mixed family her “rainbow tribe”.
When financial trouble forced her to sell her beloved chateau in 1968, she was rescued by Grace Kelly, the American actor who had married Prince Rainier of Monaco the previous decade. Princess Grace – who had much earlier witnessed Baker’s outrage when staff in a New York restaurant refused to serve her because of her race – secured Baker a place to live in Monaco, where she stayed until the end of her life.
“I’d like to die breathless, exhausted, at the end of a dance or a song,” Baker said, as reported in her memoir, “but not in the music hall.” That wish was granted. She died on 12 April 1975 in the middle of a critically acclaimed run of shows celebrating the 50th anniversary of her Paris debut.
More than 20,000 mourners attended her funeral in Paris before she was laid to rest in Monaco, where she remains today. The coffin that was carried into the Panthéon in 2021 contained not her body but soil from various places that she had called home. You might say that she was a woman of all the world – a world she strove hard to keep free and fair.
Anna Maria Barry is a historian and writer. Josephine Baker’s memoir Fearless and Free is now available in English, published by Vintage Classics.
This article was first published in the April 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
