She was, in keeping with US wartime counter-intelligence officer Lt Paul Jensen, “our No 1 contact in French Morocco”, supporting the allied mission “at nice danger to her personal life – and I imply that actually. We might have been fairly helpless with out her.”
The British intelligence agent Donald Darling had her down as an particularly “cherished agent of [Charles] de Gaulle’s authorities”. Effectively conscious of her significance, the UK overseas intelligence service MI6 known as her “the pet woman agent” of the Free French.
Earlier than the second world battle, Josephine Baker had been “the Black Venus”: the world’s first feminine celebrity of color, dancing the Charleston wearing nothing however pearls and a banana skirt, parading her pet cheetah, scandalising and delighting le Tout-Paris.
After the battle, Baker turned a distinguished and outspoken US civil rights campaigner, famously talking with Martin Luther King Jr on the 1963 March on Washington and adopting 12 youngsters from eight nations to reside along with her in her chateau within the Dordogne.
Throughout it, she was a spy. Shrouded within the fog of battle, then recounted afterwards – typically unreliably – within the memoirs of individuals (together with Baker herself) with a narrative to spin, the entertainer’s wartime exploits have lengthy been a topic for hypothesis and mythmaking.
However a brand new account, working from up to date, typically unused sources, has uncovered proof that Baker was not solely a extremely efficient agent however was additionally utilizing the identical superstar that supplied the right cowl for her espionage as a robust means to advertise the reason for equal rights.
“Taking a look at her life via the prism of the battle actually helps us perceive who she was, and to make sense of what she did in a while,” mentioned Hanna Diamond, a professor of French historical past at Cardiff College and the writer of Josephine Baker’s Secret Warfare, which is printed on Tuesday.
“The battle was so necessary; it’s the lacking piece of her puzzle. She [Baker] was amazingly nicely geared up to be a spy; a performer, via and thru. Her motivation got here from the large debt she felt to France, which had made her a star – and it had its roots within the racism she grew up with.”
Born in 1906 in St Louis, Missouri, Baker left college at 12 and in 1921 was solid in an early all-Black musical on Broadway. 4 years later, she gained a spot in a Paris present, La Revue Nègre, and set sail for France. She swiftly turned an enormous star.
By 1939, when she was recruited by Jacques Abtey, an initially sceptical French intelligence agent who would turn out to be her handler and on-off lover, Baker was Europe’s highest paid entertainer and one in all its best-known feminine celebrities.
Abtey taught her the methods of the spy commerce, resembling utilizing invisible ink, however it was Baker’s far-reaching fame – which meant everybody, in every single place needed to fulfill her – and straightforward allure (which ensured additionally they talked freely) that had been her actual espionage belongings.
From early 1941, Baker, underneath the aegis of the French secret companies, travelled from Marrakech, the place she was primarily based, to Lisbon, Madrid, Seville and Barcelona, and spherical north Africa, giving live shows, attending receptions – and gathering and passing prime secret data to allied brokers.
She proved skilled sufficient at it to be awarded, after the battle, the resistance medal and, belatedly, the Légion d’honneur with the navy Croix de guerre.
Though exactly what was within the notes that she carried – typically pinned to her bra – was, in lots of circumstances, formally unrecorded and stays unknown, Diamond’s analysis means that on a number of events it proved vastly precious, and was typically essential.
Beforehand unused sources present, for instance, that after the allied landings in north Africa in 1942, Baker and the native leaders she had cultivated performed an important position aiding US counter-intelligence in Morocco, figuring out Nazi spies and permitting a whole lot of arrests.
“We now know she continued as a key middleman between the French, Individuals and Moroccans via 1943 and 1944,” Diamond mentioned. “We’ve lengthy recognized a bit about her allied spying actions. However this position as an important go-between is new.”
Equally, up to date sources present Baker’s well-documented postwar anti-racism marketing campaign was already underneath method within the early Forties. Her excursions of US military camps throughout north Africa introduced her head to head with the racial segregation she had left behind in 1925.
Press interviews from the time make her motivations for performing very clear: “I’m doing all I can to assist win the battle effort,” she informed the Chicago Defender in 1943, but in addition “to make individuals typically extra appreciative and kinder to my race”.
Gaining acceptance from the troops for whom she was singing and dancing was about selling racial tolerance at dwelling, Baker informed the Palestine Put up that very same 12 months: “Each success that I’ve counts for my colored brothers in America.”
In north Africa, Baker carried out, unusually, for audiences of unsegregated US troops. Enjoying to British forces, she was additionally topic to ugly racist remarks, apparently from South African troops, UK armed forces entertainments officer Henry Hurford Janes recorded.
The query was existential, Diamond mentioned. “Discrimination was behind her determination to remain in France. In Paris, she had distanced herself from the opposite African-American exiles. She needed to be French and when the battle got here, not like others who left France, she stayed to assist her compatriots.”
Baker refused to carry out in occupied Paris, nonetheless, shifting to the Dordogne days earlier than the Germans arrived and, later, on to Vichy-controlled Morocco. Her 1937 marriage to Jean Lion, which made her a French citizen, bolstered her views. Lion was Jewish and Baker helped his household escape the Germans. “She knew very nicely, at first-hand, what Nazi racism meant,” Diamond mentioned.
In contrast, her ardent Gaullism – she corresponded incessantly with the overall lengthy after the tip of the battle, the guide reveals – and idealisation of France meant she stored largely quiet when its north African colonies strived for independence.
In 2021, Emmanuel Macron determined Baker ought to turn out to be the primary Black girl to enter the Panthéon in Paris, the mausoleum for France’s “nice males”. The French president referenced her wartime actions – which had been a revelation to many.
“In France,” Diamond mentioned, “she is especially often known as a music-hall star, and within the US as a civil rights activist.” A complete chapter – the spying missions, the live shows that raised giant sums for the resistance, her subsequent uniformed service within the French air power – was far much less acquainted.
Having begun her analysis “considerably sceptical”, Diamond mentioned she completed it “satisfied Baker truly was actually very precious. She might not at all times have recognized what she was transmitting, however she did what she was informed, and she or he did her greatest.”
The image that emerges, Diamond mentioned, is of “an extremely ready, shrewd, dedicated” Black girl who “noticed very clearly that she might exploit her superstar for a trigger and, typically with very nice braveness, then simply went forward and did so”.
In the course of the battle, Baker mobilised her expertise as a performer, on and off stage, for Free France. After it, she utilized what she had discovered, successfully harnessing her superstar to protest towards the racial segregation insurance policies of her native nation.
“Understanding extra about her wartime experiences helps us see how she herself got here to know what she might obtain,” Diamond mentioned. “It was the battle – the intelligence work and the performing – that made her conscious of her energy.”
Josephine Baker’s Secret Warfare: the African American Star Who Fought For France And Freedom is printed by Yale College Press
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