It's part of the American legend that the late, great Josephine Baker was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. Before her teen years, she witnessed racial violence. Before her teen years, she was working as a domestic for White people and physically abused because she was Black. In her teens, she was an entertainer and performing in vaudeville. She got to New York City, performed there and then sailed to France in 1925. She was 19. In Paris, she found instant success. She was not blocked by the thick wall of racism Black folks knew in America. Josephine Baker became a star in France's famous Follies Bergere. Baker attracted celebrated men such as Ernest Hemingway and Jean Cocteau.
Our local PBS station aired JOSEPHINE BAKER: THE STORY OF AN AWAKENING. I was stunned to learn of the constant racism she faced after she'd become a major cabaret and film star in France. This racism she encountered when she returned home to America to perform -- racism in hotel bookings, from critics who saw her guest appearance in the Ziegfeld Follies, from waiters at New York's famed The Stork Club, from newspaperman Walter Winchell and J. Edgar Hoover. What a revealing hour-long documentary. But the courageous and complicated Baker persevered and made history. In 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King asked her to speak at the March on Washington.
Here's a bit of news about some history she made:
In 1934, Hollywood gave moviegoers the first version of the race drama, IMITATION OF LIFE. Actresses Claudette Colbert and Louise Beavers played single working mothers raising little girls. Colbert's character wants to open a pancake diner. Beavers' character talks her way into a job as her maid. Colbert's character gets the idea to box the pancake mix, the mix recipe which came from her maid, and the idea makes her wealthy. She uses her maid/friend as a corporate logo for the business. The two women stay together, unmarried, with their daughter's. But Delilah (Beavers) has a little girl who's so light-skinned that she can pass for white. As she grows up, she wants to pass and have the same freedoms and privileges White people do. Actress Fredi Washington gave a stunning performance as the sophisticated, racially conflicted grown daughter. Had the Best Supporting Actress category been established by then, she probably would have been nominated.
Ironically, Ms. Washington was a real-life light-skinned Black woman. Hollywood execs told her that, if she passed for White, she could get the kind of glamorous roles that went to Joan Crawford and Constance Bennett. Fredi Washington refused to deny her Blackness and headed back to New York to do stage work.
Louise Beavers was, once again, playing a maid -- which she did for most of her long film career. At that time, Black actors were traditionally cast as domestics in limiting supporting roles. IMITATION OF LIFE gave Beavers one of her best roles in that it had more dimension that her usual maid role. A stereotyped character? Yes. But, in the last act, Beavers got to show her dramatic depth. Here's a clip.
In that same year, 1934, Josephine Baker was a movie star in France. Paris gave the singer/dancer the kind of glamorous treatment Hollywood would not have given a Black woman in the 1930s. This is definitely not a maid role. It's' from the 1934 film, ZOU ZOU. And she's Zou Zou. (Pronounced ZooZoo.)
Josephine Baker. What a life.
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