06/08/2026
A well-written article about one the most extraordinary women of the 20th century many of you probably never heard of - Josephine Baker:
A woman in a fur coat steps off the train at a remote crossing in the Pyrenees. Pinned inside her underwear are photographs of German landing craft built to invade Britain; tucked into her companion's case is intelligence on Wehrmacht troop movements, written in invisible ink across the bars of her sheet music. If the guards search her, she will be shot. But the guards take one look and erupt -- not in suspicion, but in delight. It's 'her.' They crowd around for autographs while her companion slips through passport control unnoticed. "Who," she once scoffed, "would dare strip-search Josephine Baker?"
No one would. And that was precisely the point.
Josephine Baker was born on this day in 1906 in St. Louis, Missouri -- the granddaughter of a woman born into slavery, the daughter of a laundress abandoned by her husband. She left school by the age of ten to scrub other people's floors and mind other people's children. As a girl she lived through the East St. Louis race riots, watching families flee across the bridge as their homes burned.
Dancing was her way out. She joined a vaudeville troupe as a teenager, worked the chorus lines of Shuffle Along in New York, and at nineteen sailed for France. In Paris, in 1925, she became an overnight sensation -- electrifying audiences at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées with a style no European stage had ever seen, and soon appearing in the string of artificial bananas that became her signature.
Within two years she was the highest-paid entertainer in Europe. Hemingway called her "the most sensational woman anyone ever saw." The artist Paul Colin made her the face of Jazz Age Paris in a now-iconic series of posters. She strolled the boulevards with a pet cheetah in a diamond collar, fielded fifteen hundred marriage proposals, and became, by some accounts, the most photographed woman on earth.
She had found in France a freedom her own country had denied her. "France made me what I am," she would say. "The Parisians gave me their hearts, and I am ready to give them my life." When the N***s invaded, she got the chance to prove she meant it.
In 1939, French military intelligence recruited an unlikely agent. A spy is meant to vanish into a crowd, and Josephine Baker could not cross a street without stopping traffic -- but her handler, Jacques Abtey, understood that her fame was not a liability. It was the perfect disguise. No border guard would dream of searching the most recognizable woman in Europe.
So Baker did what no ordinary operative could. She charmed her way into embassy parties and diplomatic galas, smiled at German and Italian officials, and committed to memory everything they let slip about troop movements and harbor defenses. Afterward she would write it all down in invisible ink on her sheet music, or pin photographs and notes inside her clothes, and carry them across borders under cover of a concert tour -- the adoring guards waving her through, begging only for her signature.
The danger was real. She crossed frontiers dozens of times with secrets that could have sent her to a firing squad. She turned her château in the south of France into a haven for the Resistance, its cellar stocked with weapons, a radio transmitter hidden in one of its towers. She helped secure visas and passports for Jewish refugees fleeing eastward. When illness left her hospitalized for eighteen months -- so gravely that an American newspaper printed her obituary -- she ran intelligence work from her sickbed. For all of it, France would award her the Croix de guerre and the Médaille de la Résistance, and Charles de Gaulle himself would name her a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur.
But the country of her birth was another matter. When Baker returned to perform in the United States, she found the same segregation she had fled as a child. She refused to dance for segregated audiences, forcing club owners to integrate their houses if they wanted her on their stage. She wrote articles, staged her own one-woman protests, and made enough noise that the FBI -- which had once received her wartime intelligence -- opened a file on her.
On a sweltering August day in 1963, that defiance brought her to the Lincoln Memorial. Before a quarter of a million people, wearing the uniform of the French Resistance with her medals pinned to her chest, Josephine Baker became the only woman to give a formal address at the March on Washington. She spoke just before Martin Luther King Jr.
"I have walked into the palaces of kings and queens and into the houses of presidents," she told the crowd. "But I could not walk into a hotel in America and get a cup of coffee, and that made me mad." She had built a family she called her Rainbow Tribe -- twelve children adopted from around the world -- to prove, as she put it, that "children of different ethnicities and religions could still be brothers."
"You know," she told the marchers, "I have always taken the rocky path. I never took the easy one, but as I get older, and as I knew I had the power and the strength, I took that rocky path and I tried to smooth it out a little. I wanted to make it easier for you."
Josephine Baker died in Paris in 1975, at sixty-eight, days after a triumphant comeback performance celebrating fifty years on the French stage. More than twenty thousand people lined the streets for her funeral, and France honored her with a twenty-one-gun salute -- the first American-born woman to receive military honors from the French government. In 2021, she was inducted into the Panthéon in Paris, the mausoleum of national heroes, the first Black woman ever granted that honor.
To introduce children to Josephine Baker's extraordinary life story, we recommend the illustrated biography "Josephine: The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker" for ages 7 and up at https://www.amightygirl.com/josephine-the-dazzling-life
For a fascinating look at her complex life, we also recommend "The Many Faces of Josephine Baker: Dancer, Singer, Activist, Spy" for teens and adults, ages 12 and up at https://www.amightygirl.com/the-many-faces-of-josephine-baker
Adults interested in learning more about her remarkable story may enjoy the biographies "Josephine Baker in Art and Life" (https://www.amightygirl.com/josephine-baker-in-art-and-life) and the historical fiction novel "Josephine Baker's Last Dance" (https://www.amightygirl.com/josephine-baker-s-last-dance)
For books for children and teens about more pioneering African American women to share during Black History Month, visit our blog post "99 Books about Extraordinary Black Mighty Girls and Women" at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=14276
