admin @ Tue, 2006-09-19 11:01
Before Beyoncé and Madonna, there was "La Baker" — Josephine Baker, a sizzling sex symbol with a penchant for scandal as well as showmanship. Born to a St. Louis laundry woman in 1906, "La Baker," as the French called her, captivated Europe in the 1920s and '30s with her exotic dances and stripteases. Back home, though, Americans were less prepared for a black performer of her flamboyance — she danced at the Folies Bergère wearing only a skirt made of loosely strung bananas — and she never equaled her Parisian success in her native country.
Now, on the anniversary of her 100th birthday, Baker is finally getting her due in America. Her centenary, which until now has gone relatively unmarked, will be celebrated next week, when Barnard College and Columbia University will pay tribute to the outspoken champion of civil rights with a colloquium beginning September 29, featuring speakers from universities like Princeton, Yale, the University of California, Tulane, and Rutgers.
Kaiama Glover, a co-organizer of "Josephine Baker: A Century in the Spotlight" and a professor of French and Africana studies at Barnard, described Baker as a template for understanding European and American society in the years surrounding World War II, a woman whose views and public speeches sprang from the bitter experiences of her impoverished childhood.
Ms. Glover said she became fascinated by Baker as a student, and spent three months in Paris studying her role in European society. She saw Baker as a revolutionary with radical and subversive ideas, she said, but also as someone willing to make a commodity of her body. "She was a sexy, primitive creature who used this status to manipulate situations that she felt were important while also being manipulated herself," Ms. Glover said.
In 1951, Baker created a small tempest in New York when she became involved in an incident at the Stork Club, a hot spot in Manhattan, claiming that she was refused service. The columnist Walter Winchell became involved in a dispute with Baker that grew out of the incident, later supplying to the FBI letters he received saying that she hobnobbed with communists. A Senate internal security subcommittee subsequently monitored her speeches and interviews, in which she was often critical of the American government.
"In the country where I was born, they continue to speak of ‘democracy' and ‘civilization' while Negroes are sent to die in Korea," she once said. But the FBI found no reason to investigate her.
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