The Black queer icon who spied on Nazis, flew a WWII plane, & was also a vaudeville superstar

Draped conspicuously in feathers and furs, photographer’s flashbulbs illuminating the phalanx of jewels around her neck, no one, least of all the Nazis, pegged Josephine Baker — Europe’s biggest star and the richest Black woman of her generation — as a spy. But that was the plot’s genius. And given the audacious chameleon’s ability to switch between globally famous sex symbol, queer icon, and polarizing civils rights advocate, few people were more qualified for the revolutionary gig than the famed “Nefertiti of Now,” as Pablo Picasso called her.  

Rags to riches tales rarely start slummier than Baker’s. Born Freda Josephine McDonald in 1906, her life began in East St. Louis, Missouri. Her mother was a half-Black, half-Apalachee laborer with three other children to raise on a “colored” washerwoman’s pay, making every meal a struggle to obtain. Josephine would later describe dancing on street corners “just to keep warm,” accompanied by Blues buskers begging for coins. As a 10-year-old, she experienced 1917’s bloody St. Louis Race Riots firsthand, watching white men hunt Black citizens publicly. 

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“We children stood huddled together in bewilderment, not being able to understand the horrible madness of mob violence,” Baker wrote years later. “St. Louis represented fear, humiliation, misery, and terror, a city where in the eyes of the white man a Negro should know his place and had better stay in.” 

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The experience unsurprisingly motivated young Baker to get out of Missouri quickly. By age 13, she’d already dropped out of school and married a porter named Willie Wells. Their legal union lasted just a few weeks, with Baker ricocheting into the Black vaudeville circuit for comfort and capital. There, she collected two valuable assets: Blues singer Clara Smith, who became Josephine’s first performance mentor and “lady lover”; and her second husband Willie Baker, whose last name she would keep for life. 

Baker’s formative years in vaudeville taught her not only how to leverage sex appeal, but also the art of satire. A gifted physical comedienne, by 1923 she’d secured a slot in the famed jazz musical revue Shuffle Along, a landmark production that delivered Broadway’s first all-Black creative team. 

The show, as touring often does, powerfully influenced Baker’s emerging queer identity. As Maude Russell, one of Baker’s fellow chorus girls, later told The Gay and Lesbian Review: “Often… we girls would share a [boardinghouse] room because of the cost. Many of us had been kind of abused by producers, directors, leading men, if they liked girls. And the girls needed tenderness, so we had girl friendships, the famous ‘lady lovers.’ But lesbians weren’t well accepted in show business, they were called ‘bull dykers.’ I guess we were bisexual, is what you would call us today.” 

Though big Northern cities like New York provided respite from the more extreme racism of the Midwest and South, the segregation, colorism, and conservatism of America at large continued to suffocate Baker. When the opportunity to perform in comparatively “liberal” France presented itself in 1925, she seized it aggressively. 

The Paris of the Roaring 20s was hardly colorblind, but its thriving bohemia, hunger for “Black art” like jazz and Blues, and relaxed position on segregation made the city a welcome respite for Baker. As part of La Revue Negre,  she joined the ranks of performers like Duke Ellington and Paul Robeson, all paid and treated better in Paris for the same work they’d battled to do anywhere in the States. 

Baker’s rise in Paris was stratospheric. When the 19-year-old stepped onstage at the legendary Folies-Bergere wearing nothing but a bikini adorned with glittering rhinestoned bananas, the crowd hit such a frenzy that Baker needed a dozen curtain calls before the show could continue. Her now famous “Banana Dance” was, of course, a little racist, framing the Missouri native as some kind of exotic African beauty. But Baker had curated the act herself as a subversive wink at her very white, very European audience, and she was given sensational reviews in return. It was a feat she’d repeat in another iconic number, “The Plantation Dance,” while androgynously styled in overalls and a tattered cotton overshirt. 

For the next decade, Baker’s “Star is Born” arc captivated not just Paris but much of the world. Her shows sold out. Her cropped hair became so fashionable that Baker went full Rhianna, selling branded cosmetics and hair goo to help young girls emulate their idol. She founded and headlined her own successful nightclub, Chez Josephine, and married a hot Jewish sugar tycoon, all while allegedly having affairs with Frida Khalo, Bessie Smith, and Colette.

But then came fascism’s rise in the 1930s. Though Baker had the protection of wealth, she was still Black, queer, female, and married to a Jew during the ascent of Hitler. Everything about the Third Reich felt infuriatingly familiar to the race riot survivor. 

Baker joined the Red Cross as a pilot — yes, she herself flew whole planes packed with provisions over mountains during a war — before being recruited for espionage work by French Intelligence agent Jacques Abtey. Pretending to scout locations for a cabaret tour of the Iberian Peninsula, the pair (he posed as her ballet instructor) carried secret photos of German troop positions to British allies stationed in Lisbon. When she completed that mission with flying colors, it was decided Baker could use her celebrity for projects like charming state secrets out of vital foreign dignitaries at fancy parties, including Benito Mussolini.

“Agent Josephine” spent the next several years keeping covert notes written in invisible ink on her sheet music and passing them between various military contacts. The achievement eventually earned her the National Order of the Legion of Honour. 

Baker’s spy games were just the beginning of a legacy devoted to pursuing equal rights. During WWII, she transformed her Dordogne chateau into a haven for French resistance fighters and Jewish refugees. Once Hitler was defeated, she began adopting a multi-racial brood of children she nicknamed “The Rainbow Tribe,” an effort to build a family that shattered racial barriers. In 1963, she was the one and only female speaker selected by Martin Luther King Jr. for his “March on Washington,” standing in front of a crowd of thousands wearing her wartime medals. 

“I have walked into the palaces of kings and queens and into the houses of presidents, and much more,” she told the crowd. “But I could not walk into a hotel in America and get a cup of coffee, and that made me mad.”

For her efforts, Baker was mostly demonized or derided by America. Her radical and feminist leanings so offended powerful columnist Walter Winchell that he wrote scathing articles labeling Baker a communist. The American state department revoked her visa for years, FBI agents kept a file on her, and one particularly cringy Time magazine critic even trashed her as “a Negro wench whose dancing and singing might be topped practically anywhere outside of Paris.” 

Heartbreaking as this was, Baker responded by being unapologetically Black, queer, and excellent. Her advocacy work was so undeniable the NAACP declared May 20, 1951 “Josephine Baker Day” in her honor. 

Baker died on April 12, 1997, four days after her sold-out, celebrity-studded career retrospective Josephine a Bobino 1975. More than 20,000 mourners paid homage at the funeral. She was the first Black woman to be honored in the French Pantheon, and she still enjoys a burial plot overlooking the Left Bank of Paris.