An iconic figure of the Roaring Twenties in Paris, Josephine Baker is often reduced to the image of the Black dancer in the banana skirt, her bare body given over to a frenzied dance before a white audience. And yet Josephine Baker left her mark on the artistic history of France and bequeathed a cultural and political legacy that far transcends this image. Looking back on her life reveals a woman of many causes who fought passionately against discrimination and for equality and freedom.

Born into a poor family in St. Louis, Missouri, Josephine was fifteen when she left the segregated South for Broadway. There she began as a clownish mascot in the chorus of Shuffle Along, tasked with entertaining the audience between musical numbers, before establishing herself in Chocolate Dandies with comic routines that drew critical notice. It was at the Plantation Club that Caroline Dudley Regan spotted her, one night when she filled in at the last minute for an ailing singer. Tasked with recruiting Black performers for a show at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées that would become La Revue nègre, Regan won Josephine over by presenting France as the land of freedom, where the color of her skin would no longer be grounds for discrimination. From the ferry crossing itself, Josephine exercised this promised freedom and installed herself on the deck reserved for white people.

On October 2, 1925, at the opening night of La Revue nègre, Josephine set the hall ablaze before an audience that included Robert Desnos, Blaise Cendrars, and Francis Picabia, all captivated by her frenzied Charleston and her final "savage dance." She recounts in her memoirs:

This performance launched Josephine's Parisian career: she was hired at the Folies Bergère and opened her own club, "Chez Josephine Baker," where artistic Paris gathered, already enamored of African art and jazz.

After a tour of South America, in 1931 she was hired by Henri Varna to succeed Mistinguett at the Casino de Paris in Paris qui remue, where she sang "J'ai deux amours" for the first time. This show transformed her image: she now spoke and sang in French, adopted the manners of bourgeois society, earning praise even from the more conservative press.

Josephine diversified, finding success in film with Zouzou and then Princesse Tam-Tam, as well as in Offenbach's operetta La Créole : roles that cemented her fame while perpetuating exoticizing stereotypes. She nonetheless protested: "Why do the French, who have so many African colonies, put on theater in which one almost never sees Black people?" In 1931, she commissioned the writing of Mon sang dans tes veines, intending to turn it into a film: the story of a young Black woman who gives her blood to save a white man, who is then left by his wife when she discovers he now has "Black blood" in him, and who consequently takes his own life.

From the very start of the war, Josephine mobilized alongside Captain Jacques Abtey, head of military counter-espionage in Paris. At their first meeting, she declared to him: "It is France that made me what I am. I am ready today to give her my life." At grand embassy dinners, where her celebrity opened every door, she gathered information and probed Italian and Japanese diplomats about a possible entry into the war on the side of the Axis. When Belgium was invaded, she traded her stage feathers for a nurse's uniform and joined the IPSA (nurse-pilot air rescue corps), tending to refugees.

L'avancée de l'armée allemande la contraint à quitter Paris pour rejoindre les Milandes, son célèbre château en The advance of the German army forced her to leave Paris for the Milandes, her famous château in the Dordogne, which would become a refuge for numerous Resistance members. She now served as cover for Abtey, who accompanied her on her tours under the pseudonym "Jacques Hébert" in order to pass intelligence to the Allies. After a year-long hospitalization in Morocco, she immediately resumed her activity, touring North Africa and the Middle East to give concerts in support of the Free French Forces to raise troop morale, replenish the coffers of this fledgling army, and lend legitimacy to de Gaulle's provisional government. She raised nearly ten million francs and declared: "I sang from time to time, but above all I was doing Resistance work." In May 1944 she was officially enlisted in the Air Force as a "propaganda officer" with the rank of sub-lieutenant. For these services, she received the Croix de Guerre and the Medal of the Resistance, before being made a Knight of the Legion of Honor.

After the war, Josephine continued her fight for equality and against segregation. At the Milandes, with her new husband Jo Bouillon, they created their "rainbow tribe": twelve adopted children of nine different nationalities, embodying in the flesh her ideal of universal brotherhood.

Her American tours of the 1950s turned into battlegrounds against racial segregation: she now demanded, in her contracts, that her shows be open to mixed audiences. In 1951, at Copa City in Miami, she performed before the city's first integrated audience. That same year, after being refused service at the Stork Club in New York, she publicly denounced the discriminatory act. The affair took on national proportions, widely covered by the African-American press. The NAACP soon after named her "Woman of the Year," and May 20 was declared "Josephine Baker Day" in Harlem. Her activism culminated on August 28, 1963, when she was the only woman invited to speak at the March on Washington alongside Martin Luther King.

Despite financial ruin and the loss of her château, the Milandes, Josephine Baker took the stage one final time in 1975. Her retrospective show in Paris met with triumphant critical success, just days before her death. Her funeral, held at the Church of the Madeleine, was honored with a twenty-one-gun salute, military honors reserved for the heroes of France. In 2021, she became the first Black woman, the first music-hall performer, and the first American to enter the Panthéon.

Far from this brilliant trajectory that made Josephine Baker a national figure, the show Perle Noire, at the Paris Opera, lifts the veil on the tormented inner life of a woman grappling with her own contradictions. Drawing on the experience of "double consciousness" theorized by W. E. B. Du Bois, Claudia Rankine's texts give voice to a divided woman, compelled to see herself through the white gaze that assigns her an image she came to inhabit. Perle Noire thus invites us to hear another Josephine Baker: one who seeks to disentangle her own identity from the public persona she learned to embody.