It should all happen next Tuesday. On the date she received French Nationality in 1937, Joséphine Baker receives a memorial in the Panthéon.
It is the burial place of greats of French history – from writer Victor Hugo and philosopher Voltaire to physicist Marie Curie. An ultimate tribute.
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And a deserved tribute, says Hans Klok. Baker is his greatest source of inspiration and he calls it ‘wonderful’ that her work is now being reflected in this way. “Glory where credit is due.”
Younger generations may not know who she is anymore, says the magician-illusionist. “Maybe every era has its own celebrities.” But as far as he’s concerned, everyone should know her. “Because she was an example as a person.”
Rainbow children
The illusionist himself became acquainted with Baker as a 6-year-old boy when he saw a report about her death on the Polygoon news.
“I asked my father who that was. He said: This woman has adopted 12 children from all parts of the world.” Baker wanted to show that if children can live together, regardless of skin color or religion, everyone should be able to live together. They were called the rainbow children. “That made a deep impression.”
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The more Hans immersed himself in her, the more impressive he found her story. Baker was born Freda Josephine McDonald in Saint Louis, USA. She grew up in a poverty-stricken family and worked as a maid from an early age.
Homeless
When she became homeless at age 12, she made money dancing for passers-by on the street and eventually moved to New York, where she danced on Broadway. She jumped out and was invited to Paris. “She stood out because she always made funny faces and had a good squint. Picasso sat in the room and painted her. That’s how she was discovered.”
Baker soon became an icon of the “wild twenties” in France. She went on to become one of the highest paid artists in France and the most successful American recording artist in the country. But she couldn’t handle money well. “She gave everything away. So she eventually got into debt and lost her castle.”
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She also used her success in World War II. As an artist, she was allowed to travel around, and she decided to gather information for the Allies. She became a resistance fighter for the French Resistance.
“She put important information on her sheet music. She always had it with her. And she put coded information in her underpants. She was the Joséphine Baker for everyone. She was not easily checked. She received the highest French award for that.”
Race separation
Freedom and equality were recurring themes in her life. In the years after the war, she worked to end racial segregation and tackle racism in the United States. She has only performed in venues that welcome mixed audiences, and in 1963 she joined the march to Washington. She was the only female speaker to speak just before Martin Luther King’s famous “I have a dream” speech.
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How to get a place in the Panthéon
Two years ago, a petition was started by, among others, Brian Baker, one of Joséphine Baker’s adopted children, for a place in the Panthéon. It was signed 38,000 times.
Whether someone eventually gets such a place, the president of France decides. Emmanuel Macron has therefore decided that Joséphine Baker deserves that honor. This makes her the sixth woman and the first black woman and artist to receive a place. Macron called Baker “the embodiment of the French spirit” in late August.
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About her time in Paris, she said: “I was allowed to enter all the restaurants, I could drink water wherever I wanted, and I no longer had to go to separate toilets for colored people. I’m not lying when I tell you that I was invited to the palaces of kings and queens, in the homes of presidents. But in America, I couldn’t even go into a hotel and have a cup of coffee. It drove me crazy.”
She used her celebrity as a means to reach the world, Hans says. “Sometimes she flew to another country for a day to participate in a demonstration. She has opposed discrimination tooth and nail.”
After the assassination of Martin Luther King, Baker was asked to take his place, but she didn’t; she thought her children were too young to lose their mother.
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All this time she continued to perform, but seven years later disaster struck. Baker played a show about her own life in Paris. The evening after the premiere, she walked to her hotel. “She said to dancers: ‘Next stop Broadway'”, says Hans.
“That’s the last we heard from her. Because the next day her sister found her in her bed, among the rave reviews. She had suffered a brain haemorrhage. The way to go, as an artist.” And so she died on April 12, 1975 and was buried in Monaco.
A lived life
All in all, Baker had a lived life, says Hans. “She inspired me that you always have to keep going. She didn’t have an easy life, but she always believed in herself. That’s how she went far.”
She was a war heroine, an extravagant performer – “the Lady Gaga of the time” – and an idealist, he says. “She kept saying that everyone is equal. I lived in America for a year and a half, and that message just doesn’t seem to get through. She was very keen on that. She was not only a great artist, she was an example as a person.”
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