Born Freda Josephine McDonald on June 3, 1906, Josephine Baker spent a hardscrabble childhood in the slums of East St. Louis, Missouri. After a successful audition at a local vaudeville theater, she left home at the age of 13, waitressing most of the time and working on the stage whenever she could. Her first, brief marriage occurred while she was 13. Music and dance were a beloved part of Josephine Baker’s world since her youth in St. Louis, Missouri. Whenever she could spare the cost for tickets, Baker would visit the Booker T. Washington Theater, a Black vaudeville house, to immerse herself in the captivating performances of regulars Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith.
On Saturdays, young Baker would entertain and perform with the children in her community as she moved her arms and legs alongside the rhythm of the music played by her friends and neighboring musicians. In 1919, Baker joined a trio of instrumentalists called the Jones Family Band while working as a waitress at the Old Chauffeur's Club. The band invited Baker into their group after seeing a song and dance routine she would often perform for customers during her breaks. After a series of performances at cafes and restaurants across St. Louis, the Jones Family Band booked a short-term gig at the Booker T. Washington Theater and Baker made the audience laugh uproariously on opening night with her natural comedic talents.
Following the performance, Baker toured with the Dixie Steppers, a vaudeville troupe, as a comic performer across the southern United States. By 1920, she was married and divorced and married again -- the second time to Willie Baker, from whom she took the name she used on-stage. Baker finally caught her big break one year later while dancing in the chorus for Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake's all-Black revue "Shuffle Along". New York City in the Roaring Twenties was home to many influential and revolutionary artists, several of whom Baker would come to study and learn from in her determination to perfect her artistic craft. After Shuffle Along closed in 1924, Josephine appeared briefly in a few clubs around town.
A frenetic dancer and relentless on-stage clown, she quickly attracted notice and was tapped for a bigger part in another Sissle/Blake production, 1924's Chocolate Dandies. The show made her a star in New York, and she became big in Harlem as well with performances at The Cotton Club and The Plantation Club, among others. In 1925, she moved to Paris with the American production La Revue Nègre. At a time when the French were fascinated with Black art and culture. Unlike the United States, France did not racially segregate public places on a large scale. Baker capitalized on freedoms not available in the highly segregated United States to an Black woman.
Her show-stopping finale, in which she danced the Charleston wearing nothing but a girdle of feathers, made her an overnight sensation. Soon, she'd opened her own club (Chez Josephine) and starred in her first movie, the naturally exotic 1927 film La Sirene des Tropiques. During the early '30s, Josephine Baker made her first studio recordings, though her extroverted on-stage personality froze slightly with an audience of engineers. Baker started singing in 1930. She made her screen debut in 1934, starring in, "Zou Zou" and "Princess Tam-Tam", before returning to America in 1936. There she starred in Ziegfeld's Follies that featured talents like Eve Arden, Bob Hope, Judy Canova and Fanny Brice.
Unfortunately the conservative audience and the critics refused to welcome a Black woman, despite of her being a major celebrity in Europe. She received discriminatory and dismissive reviews from the New York Times. It was her first negative review in 20 years and she returned to France. Baker’s experiences performing in the United States compelled her to actively confront racial discrimination thereon. When Brice fell ill, temporarily halting the revue, Baker broke her contract and fled to Paris. She became a naturalized French citizen after marrying sugar magnate Jean Lion, though his status as a French Jew exposed the couple to additional discrimination when the Nazis invaded two years later.
Josephine came to represent much of what Adolph Hitler and the Nazis despised. Baker joined the French Resistance at an early date and worked throughout World War II to help the Allies. Besides acting as a funnel to get important documents out of France several times, she worked as a sub-lieutenant in the French Air Force's Women's Auxiliary. She served as an intelligence liaison and as an ambulance driver for the French Resistance. Josephine Baker was awarded the Medal of the Resistance and the Cross of the Legion of Honor. She volunteered for the Red Cross to assist Belgian refugees streaming into France, and undoubtedly boosted troop morale by performing across Northern Africa.
After the war much of her energy was devoted to Les Milandes, her estate in southwestern France. Her return to active entertainment was a bit of a struggle. Baker worked the cabaret circuit in Paris for several years before performing in Cuba and returning to America yet again. During the early '50s, Baker's fight to spread the gospel of Civil Rights made the headlines across America. Baker performed to integrated audiences at a nightclub in Miami and canceled an Atlanta performance after being refused admission to a hotel. When New York’s popular Stork Club refused her service, she engaged a head-on media battle with pro-segregation columnist Walter Winchell, which she then organized a protest against the Stork Club’s discriminatory practices.
She also attracted attention by making waves in the notoriously segregated entertainment mecca of Las Vegas before mounting a worldwide farewell tour in the early '50s. In 1950 in the cause of what she defined as “an experiment in brotherhood” and her “Rainbow Tribe", she adopted babies of all nationalities. She adopted a total of 12 children. In 1951, she refused to play to segregated audiences, so the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), named her its "Most Outstanding Woman of the Year". She was made a lifetime member of the NAACP, which declared May 20 “Josephine Baker Day”. Whilst travelling across America, Baker wrote several articles about segregation.
Though she was back on-stage by 1959, Baker spent much of the late '50s and early '60s raising her adopted children. She gave a talk at Fisk University, on "Equality and discrimination”, where she discussed the differences in the treatment of race in the Americas and her adopted Europe. Baker’s experience in France and the freedom she was afforded there hugely influenced her perspective on race relations. It was this mindset that drove her to become an increasingly outspoken activist. She gave a benefit concert at Carnegie Hall for the NAACP, the SNCC, and CORE in 1963. Josephine was one of the highest profile public figures involved in the Civil Rights Movement.
As an entertainer, she boycotted segregated clubs and concert venues, arguing that if African-Americans could not attend her shows, she would not perform. In 1963, Baker was one of two women (the other being Daisy Bates) that spoke alongside the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., at the March On Washington. Baker was so integral that following Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s death, his wife, Coretta Scott King, approached Josephine Baker about taking up the mantle in King’s place. Now in her sixties, Josephine strongly considered the proposal for a while before turning it down. Stating: “My children are too young to lose their mother.”
She was married and divorced four times in her life. Josephine never depended on a man financially, so she left relationships as soon as they'd began to fall apart. However, having met an American artist Robert Brady in the early 70s, she has built a spiritual bond with him. They exchanged marriage vows in an empty church without ever being pronounced legally married. Baker had remained a bigger success abroad than in her home country. She continued to perform on stage and fight racial injustice well into the 1970s until her death. Racism tainted her return visits until her last performance at Carnegie Hall. She had a profound influence worldwide as a Black woman who had overcome a childhood of deprivation to become a dancer, singer, actress, civil rights activist, and even a spy.