Joséphine Baker

Baker grew up poor in St. Louis, left school at twelve, and by nineteen was the sensation of Paris, dancing at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in a costume that made her famous and that she later found tiresome to be reduced to. France gave her what the United States would not: top billing, her own theatre, and the freedom to walk into any restaurant. She refused to perform for segregated audiences on her American tours, and in 1963 she spoke at the March on Washington in her Free French uniform, the only woman to do so.

During the war she carried intelligence out of France for the Resistance, written in invisible ink on her sheet music and pinned inside her clothes, using her celebrity to cross borders that no courier could. She was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour with the Croix de Guerre. Afterwards she adopted twelve children of different origins and raised them at her château in the Dordogne as what she called the Rainbow Tribe, and went bankrupt doing it. She died in Paris days after a triumphant comeback show and was buried in Monaco; in 2021 France placed a cenotaph in the Panthéon, the sixth woman and the first Black woman to be so honoured.