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Post by ♥ Apple ♥ on Feb 9, 2021 10:42:23 GMT -8
Josephine Baker, original name Freda Josephine McDonald, (born June 3, 1906, St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.—died April 12, 1975, Paris, France), American-born French dancer and singer who symbolized the beauty and vitality of Black American culture, which took Paris by storm in the 1920s. Baker grew up fatherless and in poverty. Between the ages of 8 and 10 she was out of school, helping to support her family. As a child Baker developed a taste for the flamboyant that was later to make her famous. As an adolescent she became a dancer, touring at 16 with a dance troupe from Philadelphia. In 1923 she joined the chorus in a road company performing the musical comedy Shuffle Along and then moved to New York City, where she advanced steadily through the show Chocolate Dandies on Broadway and the floor show of the Plantation Club. In 1925 she went to Paris to dance at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in La Revue Nègre and introduced her danse sauvage to France. She went on to become one of the most popular music-hall entertainers in France and achieved star billing at the Folies-Bergère, where she created a sensation by dancing seminude in a G-string ornamented with bananas. She became a French citizen in 1937. She sang professionally for the first time in 1930, made her screen debut as a singer four years later in Zouzou, and made several more films before World War II curtailed her career.
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Post by ♥ Apple ♥ on Feb 9, 2021 10:43:12 GMT -8
During the German occupation of France, Baker worked with the Red Cross and the Résistance, and as a member of the Free French forces she entertained troops in Africa and the Middle East. She was later awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honour with the rosette of the Résistance. After the war much of her energy was devoted to Les Milandes, her estate in southwestern France, from which she began in 1950 to adopt babies of all nationalities in the cause of what she defined as “an experiment in brotherhood” and her “rainbow tribe.” She adopted a total of 12 children. She retired from the stage in 1956, but to maintain Les Milandes she was later obliged to return, starring in Paris in 1959. She traveled several times to the United States to participate in civil rights demonstrations. In 1968 her estate was sold to satisfy accumulated debt. She continued to perform occasionally until her death in 1975, during the celebration of the 50th anniversary of her Paris debut.
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Post by ♥ Apple ♥ on Feb 9, 2021 10:43:54 GMT -8
Baker became famous for her theatrical performances, but she devoted her life to the idea that people of all nationalities can live peacefully together. She fought against fascism in Europe during World War II and racism in the United States.
In New York... The glamorous image of the Stork Club was transmitted nationally by gossip columns and radio. By 1951, television was keeping people home, but a television show based in the Stork Club was an amateurish calamity, exposing the owner as a fumbler and the place as banal. In addition, the G.I. Bill was democratizing American society so broadly that the tiny subculture of café society appeared ludicrous while Las Vegas, Miami and Havana were drawing millions of those marks who now demanded gambling and Big Name entertainers to go with their drinking. In 1956, the Stork Club lost money. The following year, Billingsley got into a disastrous dispute with unions trying to organize the Stork Club. He lost chefs, captains, waiters, busboys, cursing them all, bombing their picket line with bags of water from the roof. He lost friends. He lost customers who would not cross picket lines. He lost much of his money. The strike went on for years and years.
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Post by ♥ Apple ♥ on Feb 9, 2021 10:45:11 GMT -8
Beginning in the early 1950s, the Federal Bureau of Investigation began keeping what would become an extensive file on the singer and civil rights activist Josephine Baker, tracking with great interest her comments in the international press critical of racial discrimination in the U.S.
J EDGAR HOOVER....
As the dispatch noted, the “Communist press” blamed her difficulties and cancellations on the influence of the embassy, a charge they denied. However, a State Department investigation included later in the file shows that there was, in fact, an orchestrated campaign against Baker, and, what’s more, an embassy employee was accused of trying to interfere with it.
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