| Birth Name Freda Josephine McDonald | Date of Birth 3 June 1906 | Birth Town St. Louis, Missouri, America |
An American born French activist, entertainer, and a French resistant agent. Her career was primarily centred in Europe, France in particular.
| National Inheritance |
She was a renowned dancer during her early career, and she was a highly celebrated performer who headlined the revues of the Folies Bergere in Paris France. Her display in the route Un vent de folie made a sensation in 1927 in Paris. Her outfit, comprising of just a girdle of human-made bananas, became her most distinctive image and a trademark of the Jazz era. During the 1920s baker was enormously celebrated by intellectuals and artists of that age, who individually named her the Creole Goddess, Bronze Venus, and the Black Pearl.
She was the first African-American to feature in a 1927 highly rated motion picture, a movie directed by Henri Etievant and Mario Nalpas and it was called the siren of the tropics.
Josephine Baker declined to perform for special spectators in the United States, and she is remembered for her contributions to the civil rights struggle. Baker declined the offer of becoming the unofficial leader of the movement in the US, following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr due to the welfare of her children in 1968.
She was also famous for helping the French resistance at the world war 2. When the war ended, Baker was awarded the Croix de Guerre by the French army, and she was called the Chevalier of the legion d’honneur by General Charles de Gaulle himself.
Baker was a worker at NAACP. Her fame as a crusader grew to a level that NAACP had Sunday, 20 May 1951 proclaimed Josephine Baker day. Dr. Ralph Bunche, a Nobel prize winner, presented Anderson a life membership with the NAACP. This honour motivated her to further her efforts with the “Save Willie Mcgee” movement after he was arrested for beating to death a furniture shop operator in New York in 1948. As a well-decorated war hero who was upheld by the racial parity she encountered in Europe, she became regarded as a controversial person and some black people began to avoid her, fearing that her audacity and piquant reputation from her past years will halt the course but it didn’t.
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