The black dancer performed in the famous Folies Bergère theater and Club des Champs-Elysées, among others, with very daring performances in which she was almost naked on stage. She was often only dressed in a ‘banana skirt’. She was nicknamed “black Venus” and symbolized the wild 1920s.
Messages in her underwear
In 1937 she obtained French nationality through her marriage to the industrialist Jean Lion. During the Second World War she was part of the resistance. She used her stardom, which allowed her to continue traveling, to smuggle lectured messages hidden in her underwear to England and other countries.
After the war, she campaigned for the rights of African Americans. Refusing to perform in segregated halls, she joined Martin Luther King in the 1963 March on Washington. After King’s murder, she was asked to take his place, but she declined because she thought her children were too young to lose their mother.
medals
Joséphine Baker married five men during her life, but also maintained romantic relationships with women. Among others with the French writer Colette and painter Frida Kahlo.
After her death in 1975, Baker was buried in Monaco, dressed in a French military uniform bearing the medals she had been awarded for her role in the resistance.
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