But Sunday’s announcement may also give fuel to the animosity over France’s model of integration, which Mr. Macron as debates over racial discrimination are raging in France less than a year before the 2022 presidential elections. Baker’s burial at the Panthéon, by nature of it being the first awarded to a Black woman, could prove politically beneficial for Mr. onstage to speak during the March on Washington. She wrote about racial equality, refused to perform in segregated venues and, in 1963, joined the Rev. Baker later became a passionate civil rights advocate in the United States. “It is this French colonial imaginary world which she will capture and which she will play with, obviously with many nods and much distance, because Josephine Baker is not fooled,” Mr. Baker had specifically used the stereotypes in her acts, deriding them as much as she exaggerated them. The dances were riddled with racist tropes once associated with Black women and their bodies in a colonial France then fascinated with Black and African arts, prompting some activists at the time to denounce her for fueling those caricatures.īut Pap Ndiaye, a historian who specializes in Black studies, said in 2019 on France Culture radio that Ms. Baker quickly rose to fame and became a fixture in shows at Les Folies Bergères, a famous music hall, dominating France’s cabarets with her sense of humor, her frantic dancing and her iconic songs, like “ J’ai Deux Amours,” or “I Have Two Loves.”īut part of her artistic career was also built around stereotyped and erotic dances, like the so-called banana dance. “I just couldn’t stand America, and I was one of the first colored Americans to move to Paris,” she told The Guardian newspaper in 1974. She said that she had been motivated to move abroad because of discrimination that she had endured in the United States.
Louis, started her career as a dancer in New York in the early 1920s before heading to France, where she quickly became a sensation. Baker, born Freda Josephine McDonald in 1906 in St. The news was first reported by Le Parisien newspaper. Baker’s reinterment is highly symbolic, coming as France has been convulsed by heated culture wars over its model of social integration, and as gender and race issues have fractured the country around new political front lines. “That was possible in France at a time when it was not in the United States.”Įntombment at the Panthéon can be approved only by a president, and Ms. “How could a woman who came from a discriminated and very poor background achieve her destiny and become a world star?” Mr.
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