Mon, Apr 25, 2005 page16

• Paris finds niche tourist market in African Americans

  The rich history of black American cultural luminaries living in the city of light for the past two centuries is coming into focus, as interest on both sides of the Atlantic grows

  • AFP
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  From the jazz-clubs of "Black Montmartre" to the scene of the first Pan African Congress and the house on the Champs-Elysees where Thomas Jefferson lived with his slave Sally Hemings: the French capital is rich in associations for African-Americans.

  But until recently it was impossible for a visitor to gain more than a fleeting impression of how important Paris has been over the last two centuries in the cultural and political development of black US citizens.

  Now a new form of tourism in the city has emerged thanks to growing demand from the African-American middle-class.

  Guides are offering culturally-specific tours to open up the rich heritage of Josephine Baker, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Sidney Bechet and the scores of others who saw the city of light as a haven from the suffocating restrictions back home.

  And despite a hard knock from the 9/11 aftermath, business is beginning to boom.

  "Cultural tourism is a big deal for African-Americans. Many of them travel to west Africa or Brazil in search of their history -- but we are seeing more and more coming to Paris too," says Ricki Stevenson, a former television journalist from California who runs Black Paris Tours.

  Stevenson's circuit begins on the Arc de Triomphe which the abolitionist leader William Wells Brown climbed in 1849 and later told audiences in the US that from the top "you could look out over a city where you are finally free, even from bounty hunters and fugitive slave laws."

  Beneath the arch extends the Champs Elysees where at number 92 -- then the US embassy -- Jefferson and Hemings in 1787 began the relationship that for many African-Americans stakes their first claim for admission into official US history.

  Stevenson is convinced that the future US president fathered the first of seven children by Hemings here -- though academic debate rages over whether they actually had a sexual affair.

  It was also down the Champs Elysees that the Harlem Hellfighters and other black regiments from the US army paraded at the end of World War I -- an episode which marked a turning-point in the love affair between African-Americans and France.

  "Black soldiers were despised by their own white commanders, who refused to let them see action. But the French saw them completely differently and the Hellfighters ended up fighting as a unit in the French army. Blacks were treated as human beings in France and they never forgot it," says Stevenson.

  Musicians attached to black units in World War I such as Louis Mitchell and James Europe introduced Paris to jazz, which has been a passion in the city ever since. The first ever jazz concert there probably took place at the Casino de Paris in the Pigalle area in 1917.

  If few landmarks from the time remain, visitors can still wander the streets of lower Montmartre and recall the thriving black club scene of the 1920s, where characters such as Ada "Bricktop" Smith, Adelaide Hall and -- of course -- Josephine Baker surfed the craze known as "negrophilie."

  Writers followed. Members of the so-called Harlem Renaissance like Langston Hughes hung out in 1920s Montparnasse, and after World War II a new generation of African-Americans took advantage of the G.I. Bill to live out the bohemian -- and unsegregated -- Paris life: Richard Wright, Chester Himes and James Baldwin are only the best-known.

  "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.
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