Under the gaze of French basketball player Evan Fournier, the iconic New York skyscraper, the Empire State Building, lit up in the colors of France on Monday evening to honor Joséphine Baker, on the eve of the entrance to the Pantheon of the black artist born in the United States.
By the editorial staff
DAs night fell and throughout the evening, the top and tip of this 102-story art deco building sparkled blue, white and red, “in homage to artist and civil rights icon Joséphine Baker,” first black woman inducted into the Pantheon, ”according to the legendary Manhattan building’s Twitter account.
Also present, Jari Bouillon-Baker, one of the twelve children adopted to the four corners of the world by the Franco-American star to assert his attachment to universalism, his “rainbow tribe”.
Now 68 years old, a New York resident, the man especially wanted to pay tribute to “our mother” and to “the love she had for us”.
Born into a poor family in the United States, in Saint-Louis (Missouri), Joséphine Baker had tried to break into New York, before choosing Paris and France, which had become her adopted homeland.
Back in the United States, she still suffered from the segregation that struck black people, as when New York hotels refused to accommodate her in 1948, or when she forced an upscale Miami Beach club, the Copa City, to open its doors to African Americans or else they will not perform there.
– .
