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In 1938, Baker joined what is today called LICRA, a prominent antiracist league. Phillips said one of the ladies who grew up in the castle and met with Baker said: "Can you imagine a Black woman in the 1930s in a chauffeur-driven car - a white chauffeur - who turns up and says, ‘I’d like to buy the 1,000 acres here?'” But they were also having a better life overall than the one they had left behind in the United States,” Ndiaye, who also directs France’s state-run immigration museum, told The Associated Press. They were "aware of the French empire and the brutalities of French colonization, for sure. But French racism has often been more subtle, not as brutal as the American forms of racism,” he added.īaker was among several prominent Black Americans, especially artists and writers, who found refuge in France after the two World Wars, including famed writer and intellectual James Baldwin. “It does not mean that racism did not exist in France. (There was) the possibility to sit at a cafe and be served by a white waiter, the possibility to talk to white people, to (have a) romance with white people,” Ndiaye said. “When she arrived, she was first surprised like so many African Americans who settled in Paris at the same time.
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minority rights movements, told The Associated Press. “The simple fact to have a Black woman entering the pantheon is historic,” Black French scholar Pap Ndiaye, an expert on U.S. Louis, Missouri, Baker became a megastar in the 1930s, especially in France, where she moved in 1925 as she sought to flee racism and segregation in the United States. Baker was the only woman to speak before him at the 1963 March on Washington.īorn in St. The homage included Martin Luther King's famed “I have a dream" speech. It especially developed my humanist values, and that's the most important thing in my life.” Her signature song “J’ai deux amours” (“Two Loves”) was then played by an orchestra accompanying Baker’s voice on the Pantheon plaza.ĭuring a light show displayed on the monument, Baker could be heard saying "I think I am a person who has been adopted by France. The French army choir sang the French Resistance song, prompting strong applause from the public.
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The tribute ceremony started with Baker’s song “Me revoilà Paris” (“Paris, I’m Back”). “They were her public, people who really loved her,” he said. “Mum would not have accepted to enter into the Pantheon if that was not as the symbol of all the forgotten people of history, the minorities.”īouillon added that what moved him the most were the people who gathered along the street in front of the Pantheon to watch. “Mum would have been very happy,” Akio Bouillon, Baker's son, said after the ceremony. Nine of them attended Tuesday's ceremony among the 2,000 guests. She is not only praised for her world-renowned artistic career but also for her active role in the French Resistance during World War II, her actions as a civil rights activist and her humanist values, which she displayed through the adoption of her 12 children from all over the world. “Josephine Baker, you are entering into the Pantheon because, (despite) born American, there is no greater French (woman) than you,” he said.īaker was also the first American-born citizen and the first performer to be immortalized into the Pantheon. Josephine Baker fought so many battles with lightness, freedom, joy.” French President Emmanuel Macron paid tribute to "a war hero, fighter, dancer, singer a Black woman defending Black people but first of all, a woman defending humankind.