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To go to the official Josephine Baker Web Site, click here. 

Josephine Baker

St. Louis honors
jazz legend

(ST. LOUIS)---A life-size likeness of entertainer and civil rights activist Josephine Baker will be unveiled Saturday, June 17 at noon at The Black World History Museum, 2505 St. Louis Ave. Admission is $15 in and $13.50 for Museum members. Anheuser-Busch Companies sponsors the exhibit in collaboration with the Juneteenth Jazz and Heritage Festival with support from the Regional Arts Commission and Pepsi-Cola Company Gateway.

Born in 1906 in St. Louis into great poverty, Baker spent her youth cleaning houses and working as a waitress.

At age 16, she joined a traveling vaudeville troupe and launched her career as a performer. Whether dancing, singing or plaything the trombone, Baker stole the show each time by crossing her eyes and contorting her body in several directions at once. When Baker was 18, she went to New York and began performing with the Ziegfeld Follies. The next year, she went to Paris where her exotic dancing and cooing vocal style appealed to Frenchmen who were serving in World War I. Performing in la Revue Negre and the Folies-Bergere, and performing her famous danse sauvage in a banana skirt, Baker was catapulted to instant stardom.

Baker's uninhibited exhibitionism and passion for performing laid the foundation for a prosperous career. In the late 1920s and early '30s, she appeared in three films ("La Sirene des Tropiques,'" "Zou Zou," and " Princesse Tam Tam"), published her memoirs, opened a club, went on a worldwide tour and recorded with Columbia Records. She was a tremendous star when she returned to the United States in 1935, but American audiences where not prepared for such a risqué performer-especially an African-American one-regardless of their success. Baker returned to France, which she claimed as her true home.

During World War II, Baker demonstrated the depth of her loyalty to France by working undercover for the French Resistance. She became an "honorable correspondent" and a sublieutenant in the Women's Auxiliary of the French Air Force. Baker moved to Morocco in 1940 and began performing in the region for the Resistance. For her service, the French government awarded Baker the Medal of the Resistance in 1946-this was an incredible honor, especially for a woman at that time.

When Baker returned to the United States in 1948, she was a staunch civil rights activist who refused to perform in segregated venues. Again, America did not welcome its native daughter and she returned to France in 1954 to rear her "rainbow tribe" of 12 children she adopted while on her world tours. In 1961, the French government honored Baker with the "Cross of the Legion of Honor."

Baker placed her career on hold several times to devote herself to her family, but was forced to resume performing to support them.

Consequently, the final years of her life were spent struggling with health and financial problems. On April 12, 1975, five days after the opening of Josephine," a review base on her life, and just hours after a party celebrating her 50th year in show business, Josephine Baker died in her beloved France. Buried with full military honors, she was the first American woman to receive such a tribute, and her funeral was one of the largest France had ever witnessed.

France had lost, not only a performer and extraordinary patriot, but also a woman who permanently changed the French perception of African-Americans. President Giscard d'Estaing, president of France at the time of Baker's passing, expressed his sorrow and appreciation for her "in the name of a grateful France whose heart so often beat with yours."