A Nineteen-Year-Old From St. Louis Takes Paris by Storm
Josephine Baker, born Josephine Freda McDonald in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1906, arrived in Paris in the autumn of 1925 as one of the featured performers in La Revue negre, a show conceived specifically as an all-Black production intended to bring Harlem-style jazz-age entertainment to French audiences. Baker's opening night performance at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees on October 2, 1925, in which she appeared on stage wearing only a pink flamingo feather, carried by fellow performer Joe Alex, produced an immediate, overwhelming sensation; the influential American expatriate journalist Janet Flanner, writing for The New Yorker, described Baker afterward as "an unforgettable female ebony statue," and within weeks Baker had become, in the assessment of multiple historians, the embodiment of Jazz Age Paris itself.
A Real Community, Not Just a Single Star
Baker's specific stardom should not obscure the broader, genuine expatriate community she joined and helped anchor. Montmartre, described by historian Tyler Stovall as "the undisputed centre of Black expatriate life in Paris," hosted a network of Black American musicians, performers, and entrepreneurs, including Eugene Bullard, an African American expatriate who had served in the French Foreign Legion and French Air Service during the First World War before opening Le Grand Duc, a cabaret that became a central after-hours gathering place where Black musicians met following their evening performances elsewhere in the city. This community drew directly on the same cultural wellspring as the Harlem Renaissance examined in this project's companion African American History curriculum, while developing its own distinct Parisian character shaped by genuinely different social conditions than Black performers and writers faced at home.
Escape, But Not Utopia
Baker herself described her decision to leave the United States in terms directly connecting her personal history to broader patterns of American racial violence examined throughout this project's companion curricula: having witnessed, at age eleven, the 1917 East St. Louis race riot, later recalling watching "the glow of Negro homes lighting the sky" while "frightened to death with the screams of the Negro families," Baker found in 1920s Paris a considerably greater degree of personal and professional freedom than available to her in the United States, eventually becoming a French citizen and, decades later, a documented member of the French Resistance and recipient of the Croix de Guerre for wartime intelligence work. This unit must be honest, however, that Paris's reception of Baker and the broader Black expatriate community, while genuinely less constrained by formal, legally codified segregation than the American South, still operated substantially within a framework of French colonial exoticism, treating Black performers' bodies and culture as a source of titillating spectacle for white Parisian audiences, a dynamic scholars studying Baker's career describe as combining genuine artistic opportunity with persistent forms of racialized fascination and objectification that, by Baker's own later account, French racism "continued to thrive for decades to come."
Setting Up This Unit's Broader Argument
Baker's story, genuinely significant in its own right, represents only one specific thread within interwar Black Paris, the African American expatriate experience already substantially treated in this project's companion African American History curriculum through its own material on the Harlem Renaissance's Atlantic connections. This unit's remaining lessons turn to a considerably less commonly examined thread within the same city during the same historical period: the substantial population of African, rather than African American, residents and soldiers who inhabited an overlapping but distinctly different Paris, one this unit argues deserves equal attention in any full accounting of the city's interwar Black diaspora history.
