Josephine Baker

Josephine Baker (June 3, 1906 – April 12,1975) was an American expatriate entertainer and actress. She became a French citizen in 1937. Most noted as a singer, Baker also was a celebrated dancer in her early career. She was given the nicknames the "Bronze Venus" or the "Black Pearl", as well as the "Créole Goddess" in anglophone nations. In France, she has always been known as "La Baker". She scored her greatest song hit, "J'ai deux amours" in 1931 and became a muse for contemporary authors, painters, designers, and sculptors including Langston Hughes,Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, and Christian Dior.

Baker was the first African American female to star in a major motion picture, to integrate an American concert hall, and to become a world-famous entertainer. She is also noted for her contributions to the Civil Rights Movement in the United States (she was offered the leadership of the movement by Coretta Scott King in 1968 following Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assasination, but turned it down) and for being an inspiration to generations of African-American female entertainers and others.

Baker was so well known and popular with the French that even the Nazis, who occupied France during World War II, were hesitant to cause her harm. In turn, this allowed Baker to show her loyalty to her adopted country by participating in the Underground, smuggling intelligence to the resistance in Portugal coded within her sheet music. After the war, for her underground activity, Baker was awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Légion d'Honneur by General Charles de Gaulle, and also the Rosette of the Résistance.

Josephine Baker "Quand je pense à ça"