Page 33 - Florida Sentinel 12-3-21

National
Dancer, Singer...Spy: France’s Panthéon Honors Josephine Baker
THE BLACK VENUS’: JOSEPHINE BAKER, 1935. (PHOTOGRAPH: MARKA/ALAMY)
In November 1940, two passengers boarded a train in Toulouse headed for Madrid, then onward to Lisbon. One was a striking Black woman in expensive furs; the other pur- portedly her secretary, a blonde Frenchman with moustache and thick glasses.
Josephine Baker, toast of Paris, the world’s first Black female superstar, one of its most photographed women and Europe’s highest- paid entertainer, was travel- ling, openly and in her habitual style, as herself – but she was playing a brand new role.
Her supposed assistant was Jacques Abtey, a French in- telligence officer developing an underground counter-in- telligence network to gather strategic information and fun- nel it to Charles de Gaulle’s London HQ, where the pair hoped to travel after Portugal.
Ostensibly, they were on their way to scout venues for Baker’s planned tour of the Iberian peninusula. In reality, they carried secret details of German troops in western France, including photos of landing craft the Nazis were lining up to invade Britain.
The information was mostly written on the singer’s musi- cal scores in invisible ink, to be revealed with lemon juice. The photographs she had hid- den in her underwear. The whole package was handed to British agents at the Lisbon embassy – who informed Abtey and Baker they would be far more valuable assets in France than in London.
Resistance heroine’: Josephine Baker entertains the troops at a London victory party in 1945. (Photograph: Jack Esten/Getty Images)
So back to occupied France, Baker duly went. “She was immensely brave, and utterly committed,” Hanna Dia- mond, a Cardiff university professor, said of Baker, who on Tuesday will become the first Black woman to enter the Panthéon in Paris, the mau- soleum for France’s “great men.”
“There’s a lot we don’t know, and may never know, about exactly what espionage work she did, the secrets she actually transmitted,” said Di- amond, an expert on second world war France who is re- searching a book about Baker’s wartime exploits.
President Emmanuel Macron decided this sum- mer that 46 years after her death, Baker would become only the sixth woman to be memorialized in the Panthéon in a ceremony on November 30th– the anniversary of the marriage to Jean Lion that allowed her to acquire French nationality.
Born Freda Josephine McDonald in St. Louis in 1906, Baker left school at 12 and landed a place in one of the first all-Black musicals on Broadway in 1921. Like many Black American artists at the time, she moved to France to escape discrimination.
After the war she fought for equal rights as energetically in public as at home, speaking before Martin Luther King at the 1963 March on Washing- ton and adopting 12 children from around the world to live with her in her chateau in the Dordogne.
Josephine Baker and her husband, Jo Bouillon, stroll through the Tuileries in Paris in 1959 with seven of the children they adopted. (Photograph: Bettmann/Getty Images)
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 3, 2021 FLORIDA SENTINEL BULLETIN PUBLISHED EVERY FRIDAY PAGE 13-A