Josephine Baker

Josephine Baker left America because America couldn't contain her — and then she spent the rest of her life fighting to change the country that had rejected her. Born in St. Louis in 1906, she arrived in Paris in 1925 and became the most famous entertainer in Europe almost overnight. Her performances at the Folies Bergère were revolutionary: athletic, sensual, funny, and utterly free in a way that Jim Crow America would never have permitted.

But Baker was far more than a performer. During World War II, she served as a spy for the French Resistance, smuggling secret messages written in invisible ink on her sheet music and pinned inside her underwear. She used her celebrity status to travel freely across borders, gathering intelligence that aided the Allied cause. France awarded her the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honor for her service.

After the war, Baker adopted twelve children of different races and nationalities — her "Rainbow Tribe" — as a living experiment in interracial harmony. She returned to the United States to march alongside Martin Luther King Jr. at the 1963 March on Washington, where she was the only woman to deliver a formal speech. In 2021, she became the first Black woman to enter the Panthéon in Paris, France's highest honor.