Black Venus in the Pantheon

Josephine Baker may be more adequately recognized in France than she is in the US, although she has many fans here too.

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Joséphine Baker (born on 3 June 1906 in St. Louis, Missouri) was not only an American-born French dancer, singer and actress, but also a French Resistance agent and civil rights activist.
She spent her youth in poverty before learning to dance and finding success on Broadway. In the 1920s she moved to France and soon became one of the most popular and highest-paid performers in Europe.
Her rise to stardom on the stage of Paris’s famous cabaret music hall, the Folies Bergère, made her a symbol of wealth and freedom, admired in her costume, consisting of only a short skirt of artificial bananas and a beaded necklace, which became an iconic image and a symbol both of the Jazz Age and the Roaring Twenties.

Baker had several nicknames: the “Black Venus”, the “Black Pearl”, the “Bronze Venus“, and the “Creole Goddess”.

During the German occupation of…

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