Josephine Baker’s Dramatic Journey — theculturetrip.com

Baker was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1906 to Carrie McDonald, awasherwoman and Eddie Carson, a vaudeville drummer. From a young age shetook up domestic work for white families in St. Louis, but by 14 was already taking to the stage. She toured the US with The Dixie Steppers in 1919, and garnered a reputation as an excellent chorus girl, whose dancing ability and comic expression were equally matched. But it was Paris, not the US, where Baker would become a star. When she travelled to Paris in 1925, aged 19, she found that racial segregation, which was part of every day life in the US, was not the case in France. What had held her back in her fatherland, making her unable to perform to mixed audiences, did not exist in France. She quickly found a different life in Paris, where hotels, restaurants and entertainment venues weren’t segregated, and it was here that she truly made her name, and indeed her home.

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