#1920s dance

Josephine Baker,

(3rd June 1906 - 12th April 1975)

Born in St. Lous, Missouri, Josephine Baker was a signer, dancer, and civil rights activist. After moving away from America and to France and leaving her husband at the age of 19, she joined a black vaudeville group. She became very popular in France during the 1920s and became one of the highest paid and most sought after performers in Europe.

During World War 2, Baker joined the French Resistance as a spy and whilst touring around Europe, she would carry large amounts of sheet music that had messages written on in invisible ink. She also used her fame to smuggle photographs of German military installations out of enemy territory. She gained the rank of lieutenant in the Free French Air Force and was awarded the Medal of Resistance and the Croix de Guerre.

In 1928, a Hungarian cavalry officer and an Italian count did just that in Budapest. According to a contemporary account from TIME magazine, "the ogling and attentions of Hungarian Cavalry Captain Andrew Czlovoydi became too fervently gallant to be stomached by La Baker's manager, Count Pepito di Albertini." The Count challenged the soldier to a sword-fighting duel. The duel took place in a cemetery and Baker cheered on her manager from her seat on top of a tombstone.

As a way to try and combat the racism of the time and show an example to the world, Baker adopted twelve orphaned children of various ethnicities and countries.

Baker received a pet cheetah named Chiquita to use as part of her dance show, and after the act was finished she chose to keep the animal. Chiquita traveled the world with Baker, road in her car and slept in her bed. She had a goat named Toutoute who lived in her dressing room at her nightclub, and at the same club she had a pet pig named Albert who lived in the club's kitchen and ate on the food scraps. Albert got so large from his lavish lifestyle that he couldn't get through of the kitchen's door any longer and the door's frame had to be taken off.

Ernest Hemingway once called Baker “the most sensational woman anyone ever saw.” While in Paris, Baker mixed socially with some of the most famous creatives of the Jazz Era, including Jean Cocteau and Pablo Picasso, the latter of whom called her "the Nefertiti of now" and jumped at the chance to paint the singer.

Josephine Baker was an advocate of civil rights. During a visit to America in the 1950s she was refused entry to multiple hotels (36 throughout her career) under segregation, which led to her writing articles about racial equality and campaigning with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, as well as refusing to perform in segregated venues, regardless of how much they offered to pay her.

In 1963, she joined Martin Luther King Jr to speak at the March on Washington, and after his assassination was asked by his wife to take her husbands position as the leader of the movement, but declined in fear of endangering her children.

Although she spent most of her life in France, Baker rememberd the impact of segregation and institutionalised racism from her childhood in St Louis where she left school at age eight to become a live-in domestic servanas where she was not allowed to look her employer in the eye and was once punished by a woman for using too much soap in the laundry and received burns to the hand.

When Baker died of a cerbebral haemorrhage, she received a full Roman Catholic funeral, and was the only American born woman to have full french military honours.

⭐️ another fun fact!⭐️

In the 1997 animated film ‘Anastasia’, there’s a quick camero of Josephine Baker during the song ‘Paris Holds the Key (To your Heart)’ and she can be seen wearing her iconic banana dress and walking her pet cheetah.

“Springvieh” dance mask by Lavinia Schulz; photograph by Minya Diez-Dührkoop, 1924.