A00037 - Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia

Haile Selassie I, original name Tafari Makonnen (b. July 23, 1892, near Harer, Abyssinia (Ethiopia).— d. August 27, 1975, Addis Adaba, Ethiopia), emperor of Ethiopia from 1930 to 1974 who sought to modernize his country and who steered it into the mainstream of post-World War II African politics. He brought Ethiopia into the League of Nations and the United Nations and made Addis Ababa the major center for the Organization of African Unity (now the African Union). 

Tafari was a great-grandson of Sahle Selassie of Shewa (Shoa) and a son of Ras (Prince) Makonnen, a chief adviser to Emperor Menelik II.  Educated at home by French missionaries, Tafari at an early age favorably impressed the emperor with his intellectual abilities and was promoted accordingly. As governor of Sidamo and then of Harer province, he followed progressive policies, seeking to break the feudal power of the local nobility by increasing the authority of the central government — for example, by developing a salaried civil service. He thereby came to represent politically progressive elements of the population. In 1911 he married Wayzaro Menen, a great-granddaughter of Menelik II.

When Menelik II died in 1913, his grandson Lij Yasu succeeded to the throne, but the latter’s unreliability and his close association with Islam made him unpopular with the majority Christian population of Ethiopia. Tafari became the rallying point of the Christian resistance, and he deposed Lij Yasu in 1916. Zewditu (Zauditu), Menelik II’s daughter, thereupon became empress in 1917, and Ras Tafari was named regent and heir apparent to the throne.

While Zewditu was conservative in outlook, Ras Tafari was progressive and became the focus of the aspirations of the modernist younger generation. In 1923, he had a conspicuous success in the admission of Ethiopia to the League of Nations.  In the following year, he visited Rome, Paris, and London, becoming the first Ethiopian ruler ever to go abroad. In 1928 he assumed the title of negus (“king”), and two years later, when Zewditu died, he was crowned emperor (November 2, 1930) and took the name of Haile Selassie (“Might of the Trinity”). In 1931 he promulgated a new constitution, which defined the limits of the Parliament. From the late 1920s on, Haile Selassie in effect was the Ethiopian government, and, by establishing provincial schools, strengthening the police forces, and progressively outlawing feudal taxation, he sought to both help his people and increase the authority of the central government.

When Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935, Haile Selassie led the resistance, but in May 1936 he was forced into exile. He appealed for help from the League of Nations in a memorable speech that he delivered to that body in Geneva on June 30, 1936. With the advent of World War II, he secured British assistance in forming an army of Ethiopian exiles in the Sudan. British and Ethiopian forces invaded Ethiopia in January 1941 and recaptured Addis Ababa several months later. Although he was reinstated as emperor, Haile Selassie had to recreate the authority he had previously exercised. He again implemented social, economic, and educational reforms in an attempt to modernize Ethiopian government and society on a slow and gradual basis.

The Ethiopian government continued to be largely the expression of Haile Selassie’s personal authority. In 1955 he granted a new constitution giving him as much power as the previous one. Overt opposition to his rule surfaced in December 1960, when a dissident wing of the army secured control of Addis Ababa and was dislodged only after a sharp engagement with loyalist element.

Haile Selassie played a very important role in the establishment of the Organization of African Unity in 1963. His rule in Ethiopia continued until 1974, at which time famine, worsening unemployment, and the political stagnation of his government prompted segments of the army to mutiny. They deposed Haile Selassie and established a provisional military government that espoused Marxist ideologies. Haile Selassie was kept under house arrest in his own palace, where he spent the remainder of his life. Official sources at the time attributed his death to natural causes, but evidence later emerged suggesting that he had been strangled on the orders of the military government.

Haile Selassie was regarded as the messiah of the African race by  the Rastafarian movement.

A00036 - Sissieretta Jones, Opera Singer

Matilda Sissieretta Jones, née Joyner, byname Black Patti, or Madame Jones  (b. January 5, 1869, Portsmouth, Virginia — d. June 24, 1933, Providence, Rhode Island), was an opera singer who was considered the greatest black American in her field in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Jones early revealed her talent as a singer, and for a time she studied at the Providence (Rhode Island) Academy of Music. She may have undertaken further studies at the New England Conservatory of Music in 1886 or 1887, but that information, like much of her early and late life, is obscure. In 1888 she made her singing debut in New York City and toured the West Indies as a featured artist with the Jubilee Singers of Fisk University. Her rich, powerful soprano voice led one critic to dub her “the Black Patti” (after Adelina Patti, the foremost opera diva of the day). Jones disliked the epithet.

Until 1896 Jones sang in concert, opera, and vaudeville halls in solo recitals or with such groups as the Patrick Gilmore band. She appeared at a “Grand African Jubilee” at Madison Square Garden in April 1892, sang for President Benjamin Harrison at the White House in that year, and appeared at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Her tours took her to Canada, England, and continental Europe. She included much spiritual and ballad material in her repertoire, but she preferred selections from grand and light opera.

From 1896 to 1916 Jones toured continually with a troupe called, to her distaste, the Black Patti Troubadors, a motley group whose performances included blackface minstrel songs and “coon” songs and featured acrobats and comedians. Madame Jones, as she preferred to be known, restricted herself to operatic selections, which over the years grew to include costumes and scenery. Performing almost exclusively for white audiences who saw her as an oddity, she was nonetheless widely acclaimed the premier African-American singer of her time. After the breakup of the Black Patti Troubadors in 1916, she lived in obscurity until her death.

A00035 - Papa Charlie Jackson, An Early American Blues Man

Papa Charlie Jackson (November 10, 1887 – May 7, 1938) was an early American bluesman and songster who accompanied himself with a banjo guitar, a guitar, or a ukulele. His recording career began in 1924. Much of his life remains a mystery, but his draft card lists his birthplace as New Orleans, Louisiana, and his death certificate states that he died in Chicago, Illinois on May 7, 1938.

Born William Henry Jackson, he originally performed in minstrel and medicine shows.  From the early 1920s into the 1930s, Jackson played frequent club dates in Chicago, and was noted for busking at Chicago's Maxwell Street Market.  In August 1924, he recorded the commercially-successful "Airy Man Blues" and "Papa's Lawdy Lawdy Blues" for Paramount Records.  One of his following tracks, "Salty Dog Blues",  became his most famous song. Among his recordings are several in which he accompanied classic female blues singers singers such as Ida Cox, Hattie McDaniel, and Ma Rainey.

Jackson achieved a musical peak of sorts in September of 1929 when he got to record with his longtime idol, Blind (Arthur) Blake, often known as the king of ragtime guitar during this period. 'Papa Charlie and Blind Blake Talk About It' parts one and two are among the most unusual sides of the late '20s, containing elements of blues jam session, hokum recording, and ragtime. A few more recordings for the Paramount label followed in 1929 and 1930.  In 1934, Jackson recorded for Okeh Records, and the following year he recorded with Big Bill Broonzy.  Altogether, Jackson recorded 66 sides during his career.

Jackson was an influential figure in blues music, the first self-accompanied blues musician to make records.  He was one of the first musicians of the "Hokum" genre, which uses comic, often sexually suggestive lyrics and lively, danceable rhythms.  He wrote or was the first to record several songs that became blues standards, including "Spoonful" and "Salty Dog". 

Jackson's "Shake That Thing" was covered by Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions in 1964. "Loan Me Your Heart" appeared on The Wildparty Sheiks eponymous album in 2002. The Carolina Chocolate Drops recorded "Your Baby Ain't Sweet Like Mine" on their Grammy Award winning 2010 album, Genuine Negro Jig, and often played the song in interviews after its release.

In 1973, Jackson's song "Shake That Thing" was briefly featured in the Sanford and Son episode, "The Blind Mellow Jelly Collection". Fred, played by Redd Foxx, could be seen dancing and singing to it at the beginning of the episode.

A00034 - Aime Cesaire, Negritude Founder

Aimé Césaire, in full Aimé-Fernand-David Césaire   (b. June 26, 1913, Basse-Pointe, Martinique — d. April 17, 2008, Fort-de-France, Martinique), was a Martinican poet, playwright, and politician, who was co-founder with Leopold Sedar Senghor of Negritude, an influential movement to restore the cultural identity of black Africans.

Together with Senghor and others involved in the Negritude movement, Césaire was educated in Paris. In the early 1940s he returned to Martinique and engaged in political action supporting the decolonization of the French colonies of Africa. In 1945 he became mayor of Fort-de-France, the capital of Martinique, and he retained that position until 2001 (he was briefly out of office in 1983–84). In 1946 Césaire became a deputy for Martinique in the French National Assembly. Viewing the plight of the blacks as only one facet of the proletarian struggle, he joined the Communist Party (1946–56). He found that Surrealism, which freed him from the traditional forms of language, was the best expression for his convictions. He voiced his ardent rebellion in a French that was heavy with African imagery. In the fiery poems of Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1939; Return to My Native Land) and Soleil cou-coupé (1948; “Cutthroat Sun”), he lashed out against the oppressors.

Césaire turned to the theatre, discarding Negritude for black militancy. His tragedies are vehemently political: La Tragédie du Roi Christophe (1963; The Tragedy of King Christophe), a drama of decolonization in 19th-century Haiti, and Une Saison au Congo (1966; A Season in the Congo), the epic of the 1960 Congo rebellion and of the assassination of the Congolese political leader Patrice Lumumba. Both depict the fate of black power as forever doomed to failure.

A00033 - Eugene Chen, Sun Yat Sen's Foreign Minister

Eugene Chen (Chinese: 陳友仁; pinyin: Chén Yǒurén) (July 2, 1878, San Fernando, Trinidad – May 20,1944, Shanghai, China), known in his youth as Eugene Bernard Achan, was a non-native (an overseas) Chinese lawyer who in the 1920s became Sun Yat Sen's foreign minister known for his success in promoting Sun's anti-imperialist foreign policies and for successfully negotiating the Chen-O'Malley Agreement that returned the City of Hankow to Chinese governance.

Chen's father, Chen Guangquan, was known as Joseph Chen or Achan. He is of Hakka ancestry from Meizhou district (present Meixing). After taking part in the Taiping Rebellion against the Manchu dynasty, he fled to the French West Indies where he met his wife, Mary Longchallon (Marie Leong), the mixed race daughter of a Chinese immigrant. Chen, as well as the Longchallon family, had been required by the French authorities to accept the Catholic faith as a condition of immigration.

Eugene was the oldest of Chen Guangquan and Mary Longchallon's three sons. Eugene's wife Aisy was of African and French blood.

After attending Catholic schools (including St. Mary's College in Port-of-Spain) in Trinidad, Chen qualified as a barrister and became known as one of the most highly skilled solicitors in the islands. Eugene Chen built a large law practice in Trinidad, with many Chinese and Indian clients. 

The Chen family did not speak Chinese at home; and, since there were no Chinese schools, Eugene never learned to read Chinese. It was later said of him that his library was filled with Dickens, Shakespeare, Scott, and legal books, that he "spoke English as a scholar" and "except for his color, neither his living nor his habits were Chinese".

After being admitted to the London Bar Association and after practicing law for a few years, Eugene married Agatha Alphonsin Ganteaume, a Creole, despite the "ironic" objections of his family.  By accounts, Agatha was fun and mischievous and terrorized the nuns at St. Joseph's Convent, where she attended school.  Eugene and Agatha would have four children who survived infancy: Percy, Sylvia, Yolanda and Jack. All of the Chen children were accomplished.

After experiencing some financial difficulties, Chen eventually left the island to live in London, where he heard Sun Yat-sen speak at a rally against the Manchu government in China. Sun persuaded Chen to come to China and contribute his legal knowledge to the new Republic in 1912. Chen took the Trans-Siberian Railroad, and shared the journey with Wu Lien-te, a physician born in Malaysia. Learning that Chen had no Chinese name, Wu suggested "Youren" as the equivalent of "Eugene".

After Sun was forced to flee to Japan in 1913, Chen remained in Peking (Beijing), where he began a second career in journalism. Chen edited the bi-lingual Peking Gazette 1915-1917, then founded the Shanghai Gazette, the first of what Chen envisioned as a network of newspapers across China. Chen had given up his initial support for Yuan Shikai, the general who would be emperor, and became a strong critic of the government, accusing it of "selling China." In 1918, Chen joined Sun in Canton to support the southern government, which he helped to represent at the Paris Peace Conference, where he resisted Japanese and British plans for China. In 1922, Chen became Sun's closest adviser on foreign affairs, and developed a leftist stance of anti-imperialist nationalism and support of Sun's alliance with the Soviet Union.

Chen's diplomacy led one historian to call him "arguably China's most important diplomat of the 1920s and instrumental in the rights recovery movement." Chen welcomed Sun's alliance with the Soviet Union, and worked harmoniously with Michael Borodin, the chief Soviet advisor in the reorganization of the Nationalist Party at Canton. After Sun's death in 1925, Chen was elected to the Central Executive Committee and appointed Foreign Minister. Over the next two years, Chen lodged vigorous and articulate protests over continued imperialist policies with the American and British governments, as well as negotiating with the British authorities over the massive labor strikes in Hong Kong. When Chiang Kai-shek's Northern Expedition appeared on the verge of unifying the country, Chen joined the rival Nationalist government at Wuhan. In January 1927, the Nationalists at Wuhan forcibly took control over the foreign concession there, and when violent crowds also took the foreign concession at Kiukiang, foreign warships gathered at Shanghai. Chen's negotiations with the British led to confirmation of Chinese control of the two concessions and this success was hailed as the start of a new revolutionary foreign policy.

The apex of Chen’s diplomatic career came after he became the foreign minister of the Wuhan Government. He was mostly remembered for his contribution in recovering the sovereignty of the Hankow and Jiujiang British Concession in 1927, which was quite a feat considering China’s weak position at the international stage at the time.

The successful recovery, to a large extent, was achieved through a clever ruse by Chen. As a lawyer, Chen knew well that according to the British law, when the property is completely abandoned, the Chinese government has the right to take it back. To that end, he advised to the British who came to him for help fearing for their safety, that they should retreat to their warships on the Yangtze River where they could be protected by the British Navy. So the British left, leaving only the Indian police at the concession who were then invited for drinks and lured away.

The British Government reacted by sending the Indian Fleet to the China Sea, which Eugene had known all along by collecting garbage from the British Consulate and piecing together cables that were sent to London. He knew that the ships would come at the low season which meant they could not come up the river. In the end, the British government was forced to concede and return the sovereignty of the concession back to the Chinese.

The situation soon reversed. The foreign powers retaliated for the deadly xenophobic attacks on foreigners by elements of the National Revolutionary Army in Nanking, and Chiang Kai-shek launched White Terror attacks on leftists in Shanghai. Chen sent Borodin, his sons Percy Chen and Jack Chen, and the American leftist journalist Anna Louise Strong in an automotive convoy across Central Asia to Moscow. Chen, his daughters Si-lan and Yolanda, Madame. Sun Yat-sen, and the American journalist Rayna Prohme traveled from Shanghai to Vladivostok, and once again by Trans-Siberian Railway to Moscow.

Life in Moscow was not easy, however. After an initial warm public reception, Stalin showed little tolerance for living symbols of the Soviet failure in China. Chen and Mme. Sun were frustrated in their attempts to establish a leftist Chinese front, and soon left Moscow. After a period of exile in Europe and brief service with governments in China which challenged the Nanking government, Chen was finally expelled from the Guomindang for serving as Foreign Minister in the Fukien Rebellion of 1934. Chen again took refuge in Europe, but returned to Hong Kong after the outbreak of the war with Japan. Chen was taken to Shanghai in the spring of 1942 in hopes of persuading him to support the Japanese puppet government, but he remained loudly critical of that "pack of liars" until his death in May, 1944, at the age of 66.

In 1899, Chen married Agatha Alphosin Ganteaume (1878–1926), known as Aisy, a French Creole whose father owned one of the largest estates in Trinidad. They had eight children, four of whom survived childhood: Percy (1901-1986), a lawyer, worked with his father for many years; (Sylvia) Si-lan (1905-1996), an internationally known dancer, married the American film historian Jay Leyda; Yolanda (1913- ); and Jack (1908-1995), who made an international reputation as a journalistic cartoonist during the Sino-Japanese War, and who wrote A Year in Upper Felicity, an account of his experience in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. In 1958, Jack married Chen Yuan-tsung. 

Aisy died of breast cancer in May 1926. Chen and Chang Li Ying (later known as Georgette Chen) were married in 1930 and remained together until Chen's death in 1944.

A00032 - Bessie Smith, Empress of the Blues

Bessie Smith, in full Elizabeth Smith   (b. April 15, 1894 (1898?), Chattanooga, Tennessee —d. September 26, 1937, Clarksdale, Mississippi) was an American singer and one of the greatest of blues vocalists.
Smith grew up in poverty and obscurity. She may have made a first public appearance at the age of eight or nine at the Ivory Theatre in her hometown. About 1919 she was discovered by Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, one of the first of the great blues singers, from whom she received some training. For several years Smith traveled through the South singing in tent shows and bars and theaters in small towns and in such cities as Birmingham, Alabama; Memphis, Tennessee; and Atlanta and Savannah, Georgia. After 1920 she made her home in Philadelphia, and it was there that she was first heard by Clarence Williams, a representative of Columbia Records. In February 1923 she made her first recordings, including the classic “Down Hearted Blues,” which became an enormous success, selling more than two million copies. She made 160 recordings in all, in many of which she was accompanied by some of the great jazz musicians of the time, including Fletcher Henderson, Benny Goodman, and Louis Armstrong.

Bessie Smith’s subject matter was the classic material of the blues: poverty and oppression, love—betrayed or unrequited—and stoic acceptance of defeat at the hands of a cruel and indifferent world. The great tragedy of her career was that she outlived the topicality of her idiom. In the late 1920s her record sales and her fame diminished as social forces changed the face of popular music and passed over the earthy realism of the sentiments she expressed in her music. Her gradually increasing alcoholism caused managements to become wary of engaging her, but there is no evidence that her actual singing ability ever declined.

Known in her lifetime as the “Empress of the Blues,” Smith was a bold, supremely confident artist who often disdained the use of a microphone and whose art expressed the frustrations and hopes of a whole generation of African Americans. Her tall figure and upright stance, and above all her handsome features, are preserved in a short motion picture, St. Louis Blues (1929), banned for its realism and now preserved in the Museum of Modern Art, New York City. She died from injuries sustained in a road accident. It was said that, had she been white, she would have received earlier medical treatment, thus saving her life, and Edward Albee made this the subject of his play The Death of Bessie Smith (1960).

A00031 - Ada "Bricktop" Smith, Paris Noir Cabaret Queen

Ada "Bricktop" Smith (b. August 14,1894, Alderson, West Virginia - d. January 31, 1984 New York City, New York) was a vaudevillian, saloon entertainer, and nightclub owner whose clientele and friends included royalty, the wealthy, and the artistic elite.

Bricktop, born Ada Beatrice Queen Victoria Louisa Virginia Smith, was the third daughter and youngest of the five children of Thomas Smith, an African American barber, and Harriet ("Hattie") Elizabeth (Thompson) Smith. Her mother, seven-eighths white and of Irish descent, had been born a slave. Ada's lengthy name was an attempt to please many acquaintances. After her father died in 1898, the family moved to Chicago, where Hattie was a housekeeper and ran rooming houses. At the age of four or five, Ada made her stage debut in Uncle Tom's Cabin at the Haymarket Theatre in Chicago. She attended Keith public school and appeared in shows there. She also was fascinated with the saloons on State Street. When she was fourteen or fifteen, Ada joined the chorus at the Pekin Theatre but was forced to return to school.

At age sixteen, Ada left school and began singing in vaudeville with Miller and Lyles. Later she toured the Theatre Owners' Booking Association and Pantage vaudeville circuits with McCabe's Georgia Troubadours, Ten Georgia Campers, the Kinky-Doo Trio, and the Oma Crosby Trio. The following year, in New York City, Ada met Barron Wilkins, the owner of Barron's Exclusive Club in Harlem; he nicknamed her "Bricktop" because of her flame-red hair. Later that year she performed at Roy Jones' saloon in Chicago and met the boxer Jack Johnson, for whom she worked at the Cabaret de Champion until it closed in 1912. Over the following years, she appeared in many saloons, including the Panama Club, where she, Florence Mills, and Cora Green were known as the Panama Trio.

In 1917 Bricktop left the trio and went to Los Angeles. While working at the Watts Country Club she met Walter Delaney. They lived together until Delaney's history of arrests for selling drugs, gambling, and promoting prostitution forced them to move to San Francisco during a crackdown on vice in Los Angeles. Rather than drag her down with him, Delaney left Bricktop in San Francisco. She later moved to Seattle.

In 1922 Bricktop convinced Barron Wilkins to hire Elmer Snowden's Washingtonians, with pianist Duke Ellington, for his New York City Club. In 1924 she performed at the Cafe Le Grand Duc in Paris. One of her first acquaintances there was a busboy and struggling author named Langston Hughes. Visitors to Le Grand Duc included Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Fred Astaire, Ernest Hemingway, Man Ray, Pablo Picasso, John Steinbeck, Josephine Baker, Elsa Maxwell, and Cole and Linda Porter. In 1925 Bricktop taught the Charleston at the Porters' lavish Charleston parties, and they introduced her to the Paris elite. In the fall of 1926, after returning from the Porters' palazzo in Venice, Bricktop opened the Music Box saloon in Paris. It closed the same year, and she then took over Le Grand Duc. Wanting a more chic place, before the end of 1926 she opened Bricktop's, where guests such as Jascha Heifetz, Duke Ellington, Noel Coward, the Prince of Wales, and Paul Robeson, gave impromptu performances.

In 1927 Bricktop met saxophonist Peter Duconge. They were married on December 19. 1929 and separated in 1933 but never divorced; they had no children. In 1931 Bricktop opened a bigger cafe, also named Bricktop's, with Mabel Mercer as her assistant. Following the custom of Montmartre cafes, Bricktop's closed for the summer; she opened another cafe during the summer in the resort of Biarritz. In 1934, the effects of the Great Depression forced her to move her cafe to a smaller location. By the fall of 1936 she could not afford to open for the season, so she and Mercer entertained at nightspots in Paris and Cannes.

From 1938 to 1939 Bricktop did radio broadcasts for the French government. In October 1939, at the insistence of the Duchess of Windsor and Lady Elsie de Wolfe Mendl, she fled the advancing war and returned to the United States, where she was reintroduced to American racial prejudice and segregation absent from her life in Paris. In New York City she worked at many cafes and attracted refugees from Paris. In 1940, when her following moved on, Bricktop helped open the Brittwood Cafe on 140th Street in Harlem. At first it was a success, drawing such celebrities and entertainers as Earl "Fatha" Hines, Anna Jones, Willie Grant, Minnie Hilton, and Robert Taylor. In 1943 Bricktop moved to Mexico City, where she lived for six years and was part owner of the Minuit and Chavez's clubs.

In 1949 Bricktop returned to Paris, and in May 1950 she opened a new Bricktop's on the Rue Fontaine. By Christmas it was closed. She then went to Rome, where in 1951 she opened Bricktop's on the Via Veneto, drawing Italian high society and royalty. While in Italy, Bricktop, who had converted to Catholicism in 1943, was involved with Catholic charity and fund-raising projects and became a friend of Bishop Fulton J. Sheen.

On March 6, 1964 Bricktop announced her retirement from the nightclub business because of poor health--she had arthritis and a heart condition. She returned to Chicago in 1965 to live with her sister Blonzetta. After Blonzetta's death in 1967, Bricktop settled in New York City. In 1972 she made her only recording, "So Long, Baby," with Cy Coleman. She also worked with Josephine Baker, a longtime friend, who was attempting a comeback, in 1973. In the same year Bricktop made the film documentary Honeybaby, Honeybaby! In 1975 she was awarded an honorary doctor of arts degree by Columbia College in Chicago. She continued to perform, but made few appearances after 1979 because of declining health. In 1983, on her last birthday, she was presented with the seal of New York City and a certificate of appreciation by Mayor Ed Koch. Just a few months later Bricktop died in her sleep at her Manhattan apartment. More than 300 people attended her funeral at St. Malachy's Church in Manhattan. She was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.

A00030 - Josephine Baker, Paris Noir Diva

Josephine Baker, original name Freda Josephine McDonald   (b. June 3, 1906, St. Louis, Missouri — d. April 12, 1975, Paris, France) was an American-born French dancer and singer who symbolized the beauty and vitality of black American culture, which took Paris by storm in the 1920s.

Baker grew up fatherless and in poverty. Between the ages of 8 and 10 she was out of school, helping to support her family. As a child, Baker developed a taste for the flamboyant that was later to make her famous. As an adolescent, she became a dancer, touring at 16 with a dance troupe from Philadelphia. In 1923 she joined the chorus in a road company performing the musical comedy Shuffle Along and then moved to New York City, where she advanced steadily through the show Chocolate Dandies on Broadway and the floor show of the Plantation Club.

In 1925 she went to Paris to dance at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in La Revue Nègre and introduced her danse sauvage to France. She went on to become one of the most popular music-hall entertainers in France and achieved star billing at the Folies-Bergere, where she created a sensation by dancing semi-nude in a G-string ornamented with bananas. She became a French citizen in 1937. She sang professionally for the first time in 1930, made her screen debut as a singer four years later, and made several more films before World War II curtailed her career.

During the German occupation of France, Baker worked with the Red Cross and the Resistance, and as a member of the Free French forces she entertained troops in Africa and the Middle East. She was later awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honour. with the rosette of the Résistance. After the war much of her energy was devoted to Les Milandes, her estate in southwestern France, from which she began in 1950 to adopt babies of all nationalities in the cause of what she defined as “an experiment in brotherhood” and her “rainbow tribe.” She retired from the stage in 1956, but to maintain Les Milandes she was later obliged to return, starring in Paris in 1959. She traveled several times to the United States to participate in civil rights demonstrations. In 1968 her estate was sold to satisfy accumulated debt. She continued to perform occasionally until her death in 1975, during the celebration of the 50th anniversary of her Paris debut.