Survivor of racist lynchings in the United States, Josephine Baker, survivor before becoming a resistance fighter
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The artist in the early 1930s. VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM, LONDON / DIST. GRANDPALAISRMN
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Portrait Before setting the whole of Paris ablaze in the 1920s, the artist approached other, monstrous flames: those of segregation in the United States.
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Sixteen bananas, that's all. Fame, the Pantheon, immortality, it's all due to that damned belt imagined by a facetious decorator, refused then accepted by Josephine Baker, who shocked the French and made all of Paris dream—ladies included. She received poems, marriage proposals (at one point, two thousand), and protests too. Arriving from the United States with three feathers and a urchin smile, she reinvented herself as a maharane of the Folies-Bergère, a Charleston dancer, a haute couture model, a French patriot with "two loves" ... Freda Josephine McDonald nevertheless emerged from a despicable world, fractured by racism. Stormy affairs, scandalous bisexuality, failed marriages, bizarre stances (including a eulogy for Mussolini), countless whims, what does it matter? The only common thread: Josephine Baker never backed down from the fight against racism. She never forgot the humiliation of the segregated hotels, the hateful remarks, the deadly insults.
The flames of hell almost engulfed her. Summer 1917. At 11 years old, she watches the fire from afar. In Saint Louis, at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, hordes of whites advance, torches in hand. There are several thousand of them. Rumor has it that the "niggers" are going to butcher white women. So the whites lynch left, right and centre. Black women and children are hunted down by bloodthirsty murderers. They are hanged...
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