Why Paris?
Between the First World War and the 1950s, thousands of African Americans — soldiers, musicians, writers, and artists — crossed the Atlantic and found in Paris something the United States would not give them: a chance to move, work, and create without the daily weight of Jim Crow segregation. This did not mean France was free of racism. It meant that, for many Black Americans, French racism felt different — less immediate, less legally enforced, and less likely to turn violent without warning. That difference was enough to make Paris feel, in Richard Wright's words, like a place to set down a burden carried "all through his life."
The First Wave: Jazz and Montmartre
(You've already covered the Harlem Hellfighters' combat record elsewhere in this curriculum — their 191 days on the front lines, their Croix de Guerre. This lesson picks up a thread from that same regiment that isn't covered there: what happened when their music stayed behind.)
The regiment's bandleader, Lieutenant James Reese Europe, introduced ragtime and early jazz to French audiences who had never heard anything like it. After the war, some Hellfighters and other Black musicians chose to stay in Paris rather than return home.
By the early 1920s, a jazz scene had taken root in the Montmartre neighborhood, sometimes nicknamed "Harlem-on-the-Seine." Drummer Louis Mitchell and clarinetist Sidney Bechet became stars. In 1925, 19-year-old dancer Josephine Baker arrived with the touring show La Revue Nègre and became an overnight sensation, later opening her own Montmartre club, Chez Josephine. Baker eventually became a French citizen and, during World War II, an intelligence agent for the French Resistance — a striking transformation from entertainer to war hero.
It's worth pausing on an uncomfortable layer here: French audiences' enthusiasm for Black performers in this period was tangled up with "negrophilia," a fascination that often exoticized and stereotyped Black bodies even while claiming to celebrate Black culture. Acceptance in Paris was real, but it was not simple, and it was not the same as equality.
The Second Wave: Writers in Postwar Paris
A second generation arrived after World War II, this time centered on literature rather than performance. Richard Wright, already famous for Native Son (1940), moved to Paris in 1946 and became a magnet for other Black writers. James Baldwin followed in November 1948, twenty-four years old and arriving with only forty dollars, in part to escape what he later described as the risk that his anger at American racism would destroy him. In Paris, he could sit for hours in the Café de Flore, work on his first novel, and — as a Black, gay man — live with fewer of the dangers he faced in the United States.
Wright and Baldwin's relationship shows that Black Paris was not one unified community with one shared outlook. The two men had a serious falling-out in 1949 after Baldwin published an essay criticizing the literary tradition Wright's own novel represented. Expatriate life offered freedom from American racism, but it didn't erase disagreement, ego, or generational tension among Black artists and intellectuals.
What Paris Was — and Wasn't
Students should come away with a layered picture: Paris gave Black Americans room to breathe, create, and be seen as artists and intellectuals first. But it was not a racial utopia. French colonialism in Africa and the Caribbean was, at the very same moment, enforcing its own brutal racial hierarchies — a tension the next lesson explores directly through the encounter between African American expatriates and African and Caribbean intellectuals living in the same city.
