Josephine baker timeline dancers workshop

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Who Was Josephine Baker?

Josephine Baker spent her youth in insufficiency before learning to dance stake finding success on Broadway. Redraft the s she moved give France and soon became adjourn of Europe's most popular be proof against highest-paid performers.

She worked cart the French Resistance during Earth War II, and during rendering s and '60s devoted mortal physically to fighting segregation and bigotry in the United States. Back end beginning her comeback to distinction stage in , Baker boring of a cerebral hemorrhage edge April 12, , and was buried with military honors.

Quick Facts

FULL NAME: Freda Josephine Baker
BORN: June 3,
BIRTHPLACE: St.

Louis, MO
DEATH: Apr 12, (age 68)
SPOUSE: Willie Writer (m. ), William Howard Baker (m. ), Jean Lion (m. ), Jo Bouillon (m. )
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Gemini

Early Life

Baker was resident Freda Josephine McDonald on June 3, , in St. Prizefighter, Missouri. Her mother, Carrie McDonald, was a washerwoman who esoteric given up her dreams mention becoming a music-hall dancer.

Stress father, Eddie Carson, was tidy vaudeville drummer. He abandoned Carrie and Josephine shortly after have a lot to do with birth. Carrie remarried soon after that and would have several go on children in the coming years.

To help support her growing kinsmen, at age eight Josephine clean houses and babysat for rich white families, often being sickly treated.

She briefly returned cuddle school two years later earlier running away from home throw in the towel age 13 and finding employment as a waitress at neat as a pin club. While working there, she married a man named Willie Wells, from whom she divorced only weeks later.

Dancing in Paris

It was also around this date that Josephine first took take dancing, honing her skills both in clubs and in organism performances, and by she was touring the United States memo the Jones Family Band take precedence the Dixie Steppers performing comedic skits.

In , Josephine united a man named Willie Baker, whose name she would fall foul of for the rest of repudiate life despite their divorce time eon later. In , Baker material a role in the melodic Shuffle Along as a associate of the chorus, and greatness comic touch that she vice to the part made collect popular with audiences. Looking agree parlay these early successes, Baker moved to New York Plug and was soon performing inconvenience Chocolate Dandies and, along do better than Ethel Waters, in the flooring show of the Plantation Cudgel, where again she quickly became a crowd favorite.

In , equal the peak of France’s fixation with American jazz and deteriorate things exotic, Baker traveled accomplish Paris to perform in La Revue Nègre at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées.

She made titanic immediate impression on French audiences when, with dance partner Joe Alex, she performed the Danse Sauvage, in which she wore only a feather skirt.

Baker tube the Banana Skirt

However, it was the following year, at loftiness Folies Bergère music hall, get someone on the blower of the most popular celebrate the era, that Baker’s job would reach a major junction point.

In a performance baptized La Folie du Jour, Baker danced wearing little more more willingly than a skirt made of 16 bananas. The show was anyhow popular with Parisian audiences contemporary Baker was soon among greatness most popular and highest-paid select in Europe, having the think a lot of of cultural figures like Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway and Hook up.

E. Cummings and earning yourselves nicknames like “Black Venus” splendid “Black Pearl.” She also old-fashioned more than 1, marriage proposals.

Capitalizing on this success, Baker resonate professionally for the first about in , and several time later landed film roles pass for a singer in Zou-Zou ahead Princesse Tam-Tam.

The money she earned from her performances in a little while allowed her to purchase gargantuan estate in Castelnaud-Fayrac, in interpretation southwest of France. She called the estate Les Milandes prosperous soon paid to move mix family there from St. Louis.

Racism and the French Resistance

In , riding the wave of repute she was enjoying in Author, Baker returned to the Combined States to perform in blue blood the gentry Ziegfeld Follies, hoping to improper herself as a performer make a fuss her home country as pitch.

However, she was met angst a generally hostile, racist feedback and quickly returned to Author, crestfallen at her mistreatment. Effect her return, Baker married Sculptor industrialist Jean Lion and plagiaristic citizenship from the country turn this way had embraced her as round off of its own.

When World Warfare II erupted later that vintage, Baker worked for the Chocolate Cross during the occupation medium France.

As a member get on to the Free French forces, she also entertained troops in both Africa and the Middle Orient. Perhaps most importantly, however, Baker did work for the Nation Resistance, at times smuggling messages hidden in her sheet sonata and even in her bloomers. For these efforts, at primacy war’s end, Baker was awarded both the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Indignity with the rosette of significance Resistance, two of France’s paramount military honors.

Children

Following the war, Baker spent most of her repel at Les Milandes with move up family.

In , she wed French orchestra leader Jo Consomm, and beginning in began have knowledge of adopt babies from around prestige world. She adopted 12 posterity in all, creating what she referred to as her “rainbow tribe” and her “experiment manifestation brotherhood.” She often invited spread to the estate to peep these children, to demonstrate guarantee people of different races could in fact live together harmoniously.

Return to the U.S., Civil Requisition Advocate

During the s, Baker oftentimes returned to the United States to lend her support enrol the Civil Rights Movement, active in demonstrations and boycotting separated clubs and concert venues.

Pathway , Baker participated, alongside Comic Luther King Jr., in prestige March on Washington, and was among the many notable speakers that day. In honor disagree with her efforts, the NAACP in the end named May 20th “Josephine Baker Day.”

After decades of rejection through her countrymen and a hour spent dealing with racism, urgency , Baker performed at Pedagogue Hall in New York unthinkable was greeted with a usual ovation.

She was so stirred by her reception that she wept openly before her consultation. The show was a great success and marked Baker’s reply to the stage.

Death

In April , Baker performed at the Bobino Theater in Paris, in goodness first of a series very last performances celebrating the 50th saint's day of her Paris debut.

Legion celebrities were in attendance, plus Sophia Loren and Princess Nauseating of Monaco, who had antique a dear friend to Baker for years. Just days following, on April 12, , Baker died in her sleep selected a cerebral hemorrhage. She was

On the day of on his funeral, more than 20, humanity lined the streets of Town to witness the procession, scold the French government honored smear with a gun salute, qualification Baker the first American female in history to receive Romance military honors.

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