Thu, Dec 02, 2021 page6

• France awards Josephine Baker highest honor

  FIRST BLACK WOMAN: Josephine Baker joined other French luminaries honored at the Pantheon, including Voltaire, Marie Curie and Victor Hugo

  • AP, PARIS
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  Josephine Baker — the US-born entertainer, anti-Nazi spy and civil rights activist — was on Tuesday inducted into France’s Pantheon, becoming the first black woman to receive the nation’s highest honor.

  Baker’s singing voice resonated through the streets of Paris’ famed Left Bank, as recordings from her extraordinary career launched an elaborate ceremony at the domed Pantheon monument.

  Baker joined other French luminaries honored at the site, including philosopher Voltaire, scientist Marie Curie and writer Victor Hugo.

  

  Soldiers carry a symbolic casket for French-American Josephine Baker at her induction ceremony into the Pantheon, where key figures from France’s history are honored, in Paris on Tuesday.

  Photo: Reuters

  French air force officers carried her symbolic casket along a red carpet that stretched for four blocks of cobblestoned streets from the Luxembourg Gardens to the Pantheon.

  Baker’s military medals lay on top of the casket, which was draped in France’s national flag and contained soil from her birthplace in Missouri, from France and from her final resting place in Monaco.

  Her body stayed in Monaco at the request of her family.

  French President Emmanuel Macron paid tribute to “a war hero, fighter, dancer, singer; a black woman defending black people, but first of all a woman defending humankind.”

  “American and French, Josephine Baker fought so many battles with lightness, freedom, joy,” Macron said.

  “Josephine Baker, you are entering into the Pantheon because, [despite being] born American, there is no greater French [woman] than you,” he said.

  Baker was also the first US-born citizen and the first performer to be immortalized at the Pantheon.

  She is not only praised for her world-renowned artistic career, but also for her active role in the French Resistance during World War II, her actions as a civil rights activist and her humanist values, which she displayed through the adoption of her 12 children from all over the world.

  Nine of her adopted children attended Tuesday’s ceremony among the 2,000 guests.

  “Mom would have been very happy,” Akio Bouillon, Baker’s son, said after the ceremony. “Mom would not have accepted to enter into the Pantheon if that was not as a symbol of all the forgotten people of history, the minorities.”

  Born in Saint Louis, Missouri, Baker became a megastar in the 1930s, especially in France, where she moved in 1925 as she sought to flee racism in the US.

  “The simple fact to have a black woman entering the Pantheon is historic,” said French academic Pap Ndiaye, an expert on US minority rights movements.

  “When she arrived, she was first surprised like so many African Americans who settled in Paris at the same time ... at the absence of institutional racism. There was no segregation ... no lynching,” Ndiaye said.

  Baker became a French citizen after her marriage to industrialist Jean Lion in 1937.

  She joined the French Resistance, using her performances as a cover for spying activities during World War II.

  In 1944, Baker became a second lieutenant in the French Liberation Army of General Charles de Gaulle.

  Toward the end of her life, she ran into financial trouble, was evicted and lost her properties, but she received support from Princess Grace of Monaco, who offered her and her children a place to live.

  In 1975, Baker died in Paris at the age of 68.
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