". . .the French-American civil rights activist, music hall superstar and second world war resistance hero, has become the first Black woman to enter France’s Panthéon mausoleum of revered historical figures – taking the nation’s highest honour at a moment when tensions over national identity and immigration are dominating the run-up to next year’s presidential race.
The elaborate ceremony on Tuesday – presided over by the French president, Emmanuel Macron – focused on Baker’s legacy as a resistance fighter, activist and anti-fascist who fled the racial segregation of the 1920s US for the Paris cabaret stage, and who fought for inclusion and against hatred.
Members of the French air force carried a coffin containing handfuls of soil from four places where Baker lived: the US city of St Louis where she was born; Paris, where her music hall performances subverted racial and sexual stereotypes and made her the highest-paid performer of her time; the Château des Milandes, where she lived, in south-west France; and Monaco, her final home. The coffin was placed in a tomb reserved for her in the Panthéon’s crypt. Her family has requested that her body remain buried in Monaco, where she died aged 68 in 1975. Projections outside the hallowed Parisian monument recalled scenes from Baker’s life, which the Élysée Palace called “incredible”, describing her as an exceptional figure who embodied the French spirit. Macron’s office said this was recognition that Baker’s “whole life was dedicated to the twin quest for liberty and justice”.
In a speech, Macron said: “She was on the right side of history every time – she made the right choices, always distinguishing light from obscurity.” He detailed the racist violence of her childhood in Missouri, when as a young child she had to serve rich white families, and was brutally mistreated, in order to provide food for her brothers and sisters. He hailed the comic genius of her Paris cabaret performances that “ridiculed colonial prejudices”.
He said during the second world war she had served France “without seeking glory” and that as a civil rights activist “she defended equality for all above individual identity”. Though born American, Macron said, “no one was more French” than Josephine Baker.
Baker was born in Missouri in 1906, left school at 13 and as a child had witnessed terrifying riots and violence against Black people that resulted in thousands being displaced. She later said her birth city “had a terrible effect on me”. Like other Black American artists arriving in Paris at the time, she moved from the US to escape racial segregation.
> “I just couldn’t stand America, and I was one of the first coloured Americans to move to Paris,” she told the Guardian in 1974.
> “The simple fact to have a Black woman entering the Panthéon is historic,” the Black French scholar Pap Ndiaye, an expert on US minority rights movements, told the Associated Press. “When she arrived, she was first surprised like so many African Americans who settled in Paris at the same time ... at the absence of institutional racism.
There was no segregation ... no lynching. [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.
“It does not mean that racism did not exist in France, but French racism has often been more subtle, not as brutal as the American forms of racism,” he added.
>> Later, as a civil rights activist, she was the only woman to speak at the 1963 March on Washington before Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. She was wearing her French military uniform. In France, she also waged a fight against discrimination, adopting 12 children from different ethnic backgrounds and countries across the world to form what she called a “rainbow” family, who she raised at her chateau in the Dordogne region. She said she hoped their lives would show that “racial hatred is not natural. It’s an invention of man.”
Baker was 19 when she arrived in Paris and became famous for her music hall appearances including dancing the Charleston at the Folies-Bergère cabaret hall wearing a skirt made of fake bananas. France was a colonial power and Baker’s routines are hailed now for the way she subverted colonial fantasies about Black women and the stereotypes they had to face.
[...]
> The ceremony was held on 30 November because that was the date Baker chose to take French nationality through marriage, on the day of her wedding. The process to gain French nationality has been made more difficult since then.
The ceremony – led by Macron, who chose to give Baker France’s highest honours after her supporters and families had petitioned for years – is seen as a move of political symbolism regarding France’s role as an inclusive society. The debate ahead of next spring’s presidential election has been dominated by hard-right rhetoric over national identity and immigration. The far-right TV pundit Éric Zemmour, who holds convictions for inciting racial hatred, has declared he will run for president to “save” France from being destroyed by immigration.
> Macron’s office said it was a sign of the universal affection for Baker in France that there was complete political consensus around her honours.
Baker died from a brain haemorrhage days after a final smash-hit cabaret show in Paris celebrating her half-century on the stage. She had told a French TV interviewer:
"I don’t like the word hatred … We weren’t put on Earth for that, more to understand and love each other.”
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Josephine Baker Becomes First Black Woman Inducted Into France’s Tomb of Heroes
President Emmanuel Macron hailed the American-born dancer and French resistance fighter as a symbol of unity in a time of sharp division.
PARIS — Josephine Baker, born in Missouri and beloved of France, whose life spanned French music-hall stardom and American civil rights activism, on Tuesday became the first Black woman to be inducted into the Panthéon, the nation’s hallowed tomb of heroes.
On a gray afternoon, 46 years after her death in Paris, soldiers from the Republican Guard bore a flag-draped coffin up the red-carpeted stairs of the Panthéon, where Ms. Baker joined 75 men and five women, including the author Émile Zola, the scientist Marie Curie, and the resistance hero Jean Moulin. . ."
Josephine Baker is first Black woman inducted into France’s Panthéon
PARIS — More than four decades after her death, American-born French singer and dancer Josephine Baker made history on Tuesday as the first Black woman to be inducted into the Parisian Panthéon.
In a symbolism-laden procession, soldiers lifted her cenotaph, draped with the French flag, and carried it along a red carpet to the country’s national mausoleum. The coffin contained soil from St. Louis, where she was born; Paris, which she adopted as her home; and Monaco, where she is buried.
Thibault Camus/AFP/Getty Images
Addressing audiences watching on TV and in person, President Emmanuel Macron honored Baker as a woman who was “devoted to our ideals” and stood out as a “war heroine, fighter, dancer, singer, a Black person defending Black people, but first and foremost a woman defending humans.”
Even though Baker was “born American,” Macron said, at heart there is no one “more French than you.” . . .
>> Later, as a civil rights activist, she was the only woman to speak at the 1963 March on Washington before Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. She was wearing her French military uniform. In France, she also waged a fight against discrimination, adopting 12 children from different ethnic backgrounds and countries across the world to form what she called a “rainbow” family, who she raised at her chateau in the Dordogne region. She said she hoped their lives would show that “racial hatred is not natural. It’s an invention of man.”
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