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. Her mother married Arthur Martin, "a kind but perpetually unemployed man," with whom she had a son and two more daughters. She was poorly dressed, hungry as a child, and developed street smarts playing in the railroad yards of Union Station. Louis, a racially mixed low-income area near Union Station, consisting mainly of rooming houses, brothels, and apartments without indoor plumbing. Louis residents as Johnson Street) in the Chestnut Valley neighborhood of St. Josephine McDonald spent her early life on 212 Targee Street (known by some St. Academic Bennetta Jules-Rosette, author of "Josephine Baker in Art and Life: The Icon and the Image" (2007), wrote about the difficulty of establishing the truth of Baker's early life, given "the factual and counterfactual reworkings of her numerous biographers" and Baker's own "numerous and often contradictory reworkings of the story, which frequently lacked coherence." Baker's foster son, Jean-Claude Baker, wrote a biography, published in 1993, entitled Josephine: The Hungry Heart, in which he discusses at length the circumstances surrounding Baker's birth based on his research, concluding that Baker's father was white, and that Baker knew that Carson was not her father. Baker's estate and some other sources identify vaudeville drummer Eddie Carson as her biological father, while other sources dispute this claim. Her mother, Carrie, was adopted in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1886, by Richard and Elvira McDonald, both former slaves of African and Native American descent. 1908įreda Josephine McDonald was born on June 3, 1906, in St. As her resting place remains in Monaco Cemetery, a cenotaph was installed in vault 13 of the crypt in the Panthéon. On November 30, 2021, she was inducted into the Panthéon in Paris, the first black woman to receive one of the highest honors in France. After thinking it over, Baker declined the offer out of concern for the welfare of her children. 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. Baker sang: "I have two loves: my country and Paris." īaker, who refused to perform for segregated audiences in the United States, is noted for her contributions to the civil rights movement. 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 Légion d'honneur by General Charles de Gaulle. She aided the French Resistance during World War II. citizenship and became a French national after her marriage to French industrialist Jean Lion in 1937. 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.īaker 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." Born in St. Her performance in its Un vent de folie in 1927 caused a sensation in the city. ĭuring her early career, Baker was among the most celebrated performers to headline the revues of the Folies Bergère in Paris. She was the first black woman to star in a major motion picture, the 1927 silent film Siren of the Tropics, directed by Mario Nalpas and Henri Étiévant. Her career centered primarily in Europe, mostly in France. Freda Josephine Baker ( née McDonald J– April 12, 1975), naturalized as Joséphine Baker, was an American-born French dancer, singer and actress.
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