On 14 May 1961, two groups of Freedom Riders – interracial protesters campaigning against segregation on interstate bus travel – left Atlanta on Greyhound and Trailways buses headed for Alabama. Turning the South’s racial codes on their head, black activists sat at the front; white activists at the back. The first group stopped in Anniston, Alabama, where they were attacked by around 200 racists who slashed the vehicle’s tyres, chased it up the highway and then firebombed it, forcing everyone on the bus to flee before it was engulfed in flames. The second group went to Birmingham, where a mob assaulted them with iron bars and baseball bats – no one was left uninjured and one person was paralysed for life. Birmingham’s notorious public safety commissioner, Bull Connor, who knew the mob was gathering, said he had not deployed police officers because it was Mother’s Day, and they were with their mothers.
Five months later, on 17 October in Paris, a group of Algerians gathered to protest a curfew imposed on them and support the National Liberation Front (FLN) in its anti-colonial war against France. They were brutally attacked by police. Several hundred were killed, some beaten to death, others drowned after being thrown into the Seine. Around 14,000 were arrested. It took until 1998 for the French authorities to acknowledge these events, admitting to only 40 deaths when many estimates range from 200 to 300. That same year, 1998, the Parisian chief of police at the time of the atrocities, Maurice Papon, was convicted for crimes against humanity for his murderous role in the collaborationist Vichy regime during the Second World War.
Midway between those flashpoints, on 19 August, the African American performer and activist Josephine Baker was awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Légion d’honneur – France’s highest accolade for military and civil action – by Charles de Gaulle. During the Second World War, she had used her celebrity as a dancer, singer and actress as a cover to travel around Europe and North Africa, spying for De Gaulle’s Free French forces. She gleaned information from diplomats and dignitaries, passed messages on to the Resistance and sheltered Resistance fighters at her home in the Dordogne.
It is not difficult to see why African Americans left during the era of Jim Crow. The Freedom Riders were just one example of the treatment they faced at home. In Europe they sought solace, respite and opportunity. But, at times, the relief at escaping American racism, if only briefly, made them either oblivious or indifferent to the oppression in these new-found sites of exile.
The Légion d’honneur was a significant award for Baker, who grew up poor in St Louis, Missouri, left America in 1925, made Paris her home and renounced her US citizenship in 1937. A force of nature and culture, Baker thrilled, outraged and indulged Paris and beyond in the interwar years, when she performed her Danse Sauvage virtually naked, wearing a tiny skirt made of 16 bananas, during a period in which European artists were obsessed with the primitive and the exotic.
The product of two decades of conversations with journalist Marcel Sauvage, Baker’s newly translated memoir, Fearless and Free, provides not so much a seamless narrative of her life as a series of vignettes rendered almost verbatim: distractions, asides and all. “I can tell you my memories and you could write them down,” she tells Sauvage. “We could do that,” Sauvage replies. “OK, well I was born on the banks of the Mississippi… Oh, look at my birds… Someone knocked on the door. The telephone rang…” While this gives a sense of Baker’s authentic voice, the narrative is, at times, reminiscent of an eccentric aunt at a party who’s had a few too many.
Baker’s eccentricities, particularly where children and pets were concerned, were legion. Among other things, she bottle-fed her goat Toutoute between dances; owned a pet cheetah, Chiquita, and a pet pig, Albert; and fielded complaints from one theatre manager about the droppings from her pet rabbit. More problematically, she adopted 12 children of different races, religions or ethnicities, called them her “Rainbow Tribe” and made their home a theme park with visitors following signs to “Village of the World” and “Capital of Brotherhood”. “She dreamt of a place where cultures and religions could cohabit,” recalls her son Brian, born Brahim in Algeria. She referred to it as “a sort of private Unesco”.
France for her was not only a country where she was accepted and where her career had taken off in a way it never could have in the US. It was also a refuge from America’s brutal racism. Her hit song of the 1930s “J’ai Deux Amours (Mon Pays et Paris)” – “I Have Two Loves (My Country and Paris”) – implies she was in some way conflicted about her sense of national belonging.
She wasn’t. In Fearless and Free, she explains her attitude to being recruited into the war effort. “The Free French… lent me to the Americans and then the English. In both cases, I remained exclusively in the service of France… I warned them all: ‘Anything that helps France is fine, I’ll take part. Otherwise, no matter your reasons, we’re enemies.’” When it comes to African American artists enamoured by France, Baker was one of the earliest and most prominent, but by no means alone. Musicians such as Dexter Gordon, Bud Powell and Kenny Clarke, and writers including Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Chester Himes, also made the pilgrimage. Occasionally the trauma of what they had escaped seemed to blind them from the trauma to which they were now witness.
In Europe more generally, such figures sought solace, respite and opportunity. “There is more freedom in one square block of Paris than there is in the entire United States of America!” wrote Wright, who moved to France in 1946 (just a year after Ho Chi Minh claimed independence for Vietnam, and six years before Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks was published), claimed French citizenship, and died there in 1960. On arriving in the Soviet Union for a visit in 1934, shortly before the main purges but with Stalinism already entrenched, the singer and actor Paul Robeson said, “I feel like a human being for the first time since I grew up. Here I am not a Negro but a human being.”
Two years later the intellectual and activist WEB Du Bois went to Nazi Germany. Cursorily acknowledging an “instinctive prejudice… in the case of Jews”, he went on to celebrate the fact that “I can go to any hotel which I can afford; I can dine where I please and have the head waiter bow me welcome… In fine, I have complete civic freedom and public courtesy.”
When Baldwin turned on Wright, his former friend and mentor, it was, in part, because he felt that Wright was unaware or unconcerned about the privileges he enjoyed as an American who lay outside France’s caste hierarchy. In his essay “Alas, Poor Richard”, he writes: “Richard was able, at last, to live in Paris exactly as he would have lived, had he been a white man, here, in America. This may seem desirable, but I wonder if it is… It did not seem worthwhile to me to have fled the native fantasy only to embrace a foreign one.”
But France in general, and Paris in particular, was a favoured destination for African American artists for good reason. The French valued the arts in a way that America did not, and particularly fell in love with jazz. The country’s founding creed of Republican universalism, which rejected race as a category, provided more space for black people to operate than was possible in America, even if it did not reject racism or the colonialism that came with it.
This contradiction often proved at least as helpful to the propaganda purposes of their hosts as it did to the exiles. In 2021, Baker became the first woman of colour to be honoured at the Panthéon, where the French lay their great and good – including Voltaire, Victor Hugo and Marie Curie – to rest. Efforts to persuade the French polity to bestow that honour on the Tunisian-French lawyer, feminist, essayist and MP Gisèle Halimi, famous for her work on abortion, wealth redistribution and human rights, were rejected. Halimi had been a counsel for the FLN; her interment at the Panthéon in the run-up to an election year was regarded as too divisive.
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, however, used Baker’s admission into the Panthéon to extol her belief in “universalism” and understanding that being an immigrant came with responsibilities as well as rights – a speech aimed at placating anti-migrant anxieties and serving as a scarcely veiled criticism of Black Lives Matter.
Quite what Baker would have made of this is unclear. Wilful, impetuous and courageous, she was one of those black women of the early 20th century who, in her own way, refused to know her place. As such, she ranks alongside Zora Neale Hurston, the American Harlem Renaissance writer who drove through the American South collecting folklore tales in a Chevrolet she called “Sassy Susie”, and Claudia Jones, the chain-smoking Trinidad-born communist deported from America to England, who set up the West Indian Gazette newspaper and organised what would become Notting Hill Carnival.
“I’m not intimidated by anyone,” Baker says in her memoir. “Everyone is made with two arms, two legs, a belly and a head. It’s enough to think about that, to look, in order to notice a great quality or a small flaw.”
[See also: To catch a strongman]
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This article appears in the 10 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Spring Special 2025