"African-American history is everywhere in Paris but impossible to see unless you have someone to point it out," says Monique Wells, who devises walking itineraries for her clients at Discover Paris.
"Take the Louvre. You would not think there was any link with black Americans. But the father of African-American painting Henry O. Tanner studied in Paris, and some of his pictures were hung in the gallery.
"Or the Luxembourg gardens. This was where the African-American pianist Philippa Schuyler would come for walks with Gaston Monnerville -- the black president of the French Senate -- in the 1960s. If you dig, there is always some connection to our past," she says.
Other spots include the Madeleine church, where the funeral of Josephine Baker took place in great pomp in 1975; the Grand Hotel on the Place de l'Opera where W.E.B. Dubois organized the first Pan African Congress in 1919 on the sidelines of the post-war peace talks; and Haynes restaurant, opened by an African-American in 1949 and still going strong.
The unifying theme of the tours is the vision harbored by generations of black Americans that France was a country where they could more easily be themselves -- free from the obstacles and assumptions that so circumscribed their lives in the US.
RSS