Singer, civil rights activist Baker honored at France’s Pantheon
PARIS — Josephine Baker — the U.S.-born entertainer, anti-Nazi spy and civil rights activist — was inducted into France’s Pantheon on Tuesday, becoming the first Black woman to receive the nation’s highest honor.
Baker’s voice resonated through the streets of Paris’ famed Left Bank as recordings from her extraordinary career kicked off an elaborate ceremony at the domed Pantheon monument. Baker joined other French luminaries honored at the site, including philosopher Voltaire, scientist Marie Curie and writer Victor Hugo.
Military officers from the Air Force carried her cenotaph along a red carpet that stretched for four blocks of cobblestoned streets from the Luxembourg Gardens to the Pantheon. Baker’s military medals lay atop the cenotaph, which was draped in the French tricolor flag and contained soil from her birthplace in Missouri, from France and from her final resting place in Monaco. Her body stayed in Monaco at the request of her family.
French President Emmanuel Macron paid tribute to “a war hero, fighter, dancer, singer; a Black woman defending Black people but first of all, a woman defending humankind. American and French. Josephine Baker fought so many battles with lightness, freedom, joy.”
“Josephine Baker, you are entering into the Pantheon because, (despite) born American, there is no greater French (woman) than you,” he said.
Baker was also the first American-born citizen and the first performer to be immortalized into the Pantheon.
She is not only praised for her world-renowned artistic career but also for her active role in the French Resistance during World War II, her actions as a civil rights activist and her humanist values, which she displayed through the adoption of her 12 children from all over the world. Nine of them attended Tuesday’s ceremony among the 2,000 guests.
“Mum would have been very happy,” Akio Bouillon, Baker’s son, said after the ceremony. “Mum would not have accepted to enter into the Pantheon if that was not as the symbol of all the forgotten people of history, the minorities.”
Born in St. Louis, Mo., Baker became a megastar in the 1930s, especially in France, where she moved in 1925 as she sought to flee racism and segregation in the United States.
“The simple fact to have a Black woman entering the Pantheon is historic,” said Black French scholar Pap Ndiaye, an expert on U.S. minority rights movements.
Baker became a French citizen after her marriage to industrialist Jean Lion in 1937. The same year, she settled in southwestern France, in the castle of Castelnaud-la-Chapelle.
Baker died in Paris in 1975 at age 68.