The Black Venus

Josephine Baker: "The Nazis were racists. They were bigots. I despised that sort of thing and was determined that they must be defeated."

If you’ve been following me here at Substack, you know that I love to highlight people who are unlikely heroes, or more accurately, who were always heroes, but didn’t meet the traditional definition of the word. I often learn about individuals who had something to lose, but decided to risk it anyway: whistleblowers, witnesses, people who put their careers on the line because staying quiet was worse than the consequences of speaking up. In my mind, that’s a beautiful form of courage. But, courage doesn’t fit just one mold.

Sometimes courage can look like a woman dressed in a feathered and sequined gown, blowing kisses to a room full of Nazi officers, with military secrets pinned inside her underwear. That, my friends, was Josephine Baker. During one of the darkest moments in history, she made a choice most people never have to make and she made it with the whole world watching her for entirely different reasons.

Josephine Baker was born into poverty in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1906. With little schooling and while living in rat-infested hovels, she had no consistent support system. She reportedly married for the first time at the age of 13(!) and grew up a black girl in Jim Crow America, which meant she grew up knowing exactly what it felt like to be denied basic dignity and civil rights before she ever set foot on a stage. By her teenage years, Baker was performing in Vaudeville and by age 19, she had already left America for Paris, a city that embraced her as a star in a way her own country never would.

In Paris, she was an absolute sensation. The French called her “The Black Venus” and “The Black Pearl.” Eventually, she became so famous, she was known simply as “La Baker.”

Here’s the thing about that kind of fame and privilege: it could have been her whole story. Baker could have just rested on her laurels and not stepped up when it counted the most. But, she refused to stay on the sidelines and she ended up volunteering for one of the most dangerous roles she would ever play.

When the Nazis marched into France, Josephine Baker didn’t flee. She became a French citizen in 1937 out of loyalty to the country that had given her a professional and personal home. Then, in 1939, Jacques Abtey, the head of French military intelligence, approached Baker to recruit her to be a spy. Without hesitation, she said yes: “France made me what I am. The Parisians gave me their hearts, and I am ready to give them my life.”

In a 1973 interview with Ebony magazine, Baker explained that she loved her adopted country of France, but she said: the “overriding consideration, the thing that drove me as strongly as did patriotism, was my violent hatred of discrimination in any form. The Nazis were racists. They were bigots. I despised that sort of thing and was determined that they must be defeated.”

Despite her willingness to be a spy, the idea of Josephine Baker, specifically, in that role was wild. Spies are supposed to disappear into a crowd. To be discreet and to go unnoticed. But, Josephine Baker couldn’t just disappear because she was one of the most recognized faces in the world. So French intelligence turned what otherwise would have been a liability into an asset: nobody would suspect the world’s most famous entertainer at the time of smuggling secrets.

She used her celebrity to work every room that mattered. She went to diplomatic parties in the Japanese and Italian embassies and at dinners with high-ranking Axis officials, quietly absorbing intel on troop movements and military installations. Then, while under the guise of touring and performing, Baker moved that info across borders in ways that sound like fiction, except it wasn’t: notes in invisible ink on her sheet music and secrets pinned as notes to her bra with a safety pin. She riskily bet that her fame as an international star would make border guards too starstruck to try to search her body.

Baker was commissioned a sub-lieutenant in the Women’s Auxiliary of the Free French Air Force. Former President of France and the leader of the Free French cause, Charles de Gaulle, awarded her the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille de la Résistance with rosette, among France’s most prestigious decorations for wartime service and resistance. France honored her as a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur, and in 2021, the country did something it had never done before: it inducted her into the Panthéon, the resting place reserved for the nation’s most honored dead. She was the first Black woman ever to be honored in that way.

Here’s the myth Josephine Baker destroyed: the idea that resistance requires a certain kind of person. Someone trained for it. Someone with nothing left to lose. Someone who “looks” the part.

Sound familiar? It should. I’ve written here at Substack about the same myth that Joan of Arc destroyed centuries earlier: a French teenage peasant girl with no military training and no title, who ended up commanding armies because she refused to accept that leadership belonged only to men born into it. Nobody looked at either Josephine Baker or Joan of Arc and saw a soldier or a spy. That was precisely the point. Joan and Josephine both understood something we still get wrong about heroism: it isn’t granted by the people who already hold the power. It’s taken by the people willing to act like they already have the right to it, and let history catch up later.

Baker had everything to lose. A career built entirely on being seen, being adored, being untouchable. She could have stayed silent and played it safe; after all, plenty of famous people did exactly that, then and now. Instead, she looked at what fascism was doing to the world and decided her own comfort didn’t eclipse what was right.

Adversity doesn’t wait for you to feel qualified to face it. It shows up uninvited, and you either meet it or you don’t. Baker met it in sequins, glamour, and stage lights, turning the very thing that made her vulnerable — her visibility — into a weapon against the people trying to erase entire groups of human beings.

Let’s not skip past the irony here, because that’s the whole point. This was a black woman raised in a country that lynched people who looked like her, denied her the right to vote, to drink from the same water fountain as whites, to be treated as fully human under its own laws. America never earned her loyalty. And yet she risked her life for democracy anyway and not the version of it America had shown her, but the idea of democracy itself…the belief that people are entitled to self-determination and dignity no matter what a government has told them they’re worth. Joséphine Baker fought for a freedom her own country refused to extend to her. That kind of conviction is bigger than any one nation’s failures, including the one she was born into.

Baker didn’t stop when the war ended. She came back to America, a country that was still virulently racist. So, she fought that fight, too. She refused to perform before segregated audiences. She protested in the streets and participated in civil rights demonstrations. And, in 1963, while dressed in her French Resistance uniform adorned with all of her medals, she stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at the March on Washington. One of the only women asked to speak that day, Baker spoke to the crowd of more than 250,000 people for over 20 minutes, shortly before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s "I Have a Dream" speech.

Every single one of us gets a smaller version of Josephine Baker’s choice, more often than we’d like to admit: to speak up or to stay quiet. To risk something or protect our comfort. To use the platform we have or let it sit there, uncomfortably silent. You don't need permission to be brave. You don't need to look like a hero to act like one. We all have a part to play in defending our democracy against the tyranny of today.