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She wants them to coexist in love. En 1969, après des années de difficultés financières catastrophiques, elle est expulsée des Milandes under dramatic circumstances— she is found sitting on the steps of her empty château, refusing to leave. It was Princess Grace of Monaco who offered her a villa on the French Riviera. Josephine Baker lost her home, but never her faith.
THE STRUGGLE FOR CIVIL RIGHTS · 1951 – 1963 A voice that resonates around the world
Josephine Baker
Since the postwar period, Josephine Baker has waged a personal war against racial segregation in the United States. During her American tours in the 1950s, she refused to perform before segregated audiences— and she made this a requirement in her contracts. She was one of the first artists to demand mixed audiences, sometimes triggering boycotts, sometimes scandals, and sometimes remarkable victories. In 1951, when she was denied entry to the Stork Club in New York because she was Black, she brought the matter into the public eye with a verbal outburst that stunned Truman’ s America. She was labeled a“ communist” by the FBI and by Walter Winchell’ s influential column. She would respond to this accusation in 1963, before an audience of 250,000 people.“ They thought they could smear me. The best way to do that was to call me a communist. And you know what that meant. Those words were feared back then. I was hounded by U. S. government agencies, and there was never a shred of evidence that I was a communist”. August 28, 1963, marked the high point of her political activism. At age 57, Josephine Baker arrived from France wearing a French Air Force uniform— her Resistance medals pinned to her chest— to address the 250,000 people gathered for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. She was the only woman to speak to that crowd. Her speech immediately preceded Martin Luther King’ s“ I Have a Dream.” In this strikingly powerful speech, she recounted her life— the last car of the train in St. Louis, Paris and her newfound freedom,
Flashmag! Edition 172 Mai 2026
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