Remember the Ladies: Josephine Baker's Double Life as a Spy for the French Resistance

Josephine Baker, c. 1945
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Josephine Baker was born Freda Josephine McDonald on June 3, 1906, in St. Louis, Missouri. She never knew her father. Her family was impoverished and when she was eight years old, Josephine began working as a live-in domestic maid for white families. By age twelve, Josephine had dropped out of school. Singing and dancing gave her joy, and she danced on the street corner for money. Later she joined a vaudeville troop and moved to New York City. When she was nineteen years old Josephine moved to Paris, working as a burlesque dancer. In Paris, her skin was viewed as exotic; in the U.S. she faced racism because of her skin color.

Josephine became a famous entertainer in France. She fell in love with her new country and became a French citizen. When Hitler rose to power in Germany, the French government asked her to spy for France. She wholeheartedly agreed. “France made me what I am,” she told Jacques Abtey, head of French Military Intelligence. “The Parisians gave me their hearts, and I am ready to give them my life.”

Although she was beloved in France, she faced discrimination in Fascist Europe. People yelled, "Go back to Africa!"

“Of course I wanted to do all I could to aid France, my adopted country,” she told Ebony magazine decades later, “but an overriding consideration, the thing that drove me as strongly as did patriotism, was my violent hatred of discrimination in any form.”

Josephine attended diplomatic dinners at the Japanese and Italian embassies, charming people and gathering information. She wrote detailed notes while in the bathroom and pinned the notes to her bra and underwear.

When the Germans were closing in on Paris, Abtey insisted that Josephine move to her country house in the Dordogne. There she sheltered Jewish refugees and French resistance fighters.

Her efforts to gather intelligence continued. She smuggled documents with German troop movements to General Charles de Gaulle and the Free French government in London by using invisible ink on her sheet music. She hid photographs underneath her dress. Because she was an international celebrity, Josephine was able to travel freely to neutral countries without suspicion.

In 1941, Josephine's orders took her to Morocco where she and the French Resistance obtained passports for Jews fleeing the Nazis in Eastern Europe. Soon after, she was hospitalized for peritonitis and underwent multiple surgeries. Josephine continued working - American diplomats and French resistance members worked at her bedside. After she was discharged from the hospital, Josephine toured Allied camps from North Africa to Palestine.

Josephine returned to Paris after it was liberated from the Nazis in October 1944. She wore her navy blue military uniform and rode in the back of a car. Throngs of people threw flowers to her as her car drove down the Champs-Élysées.

In 1961, Josephine was awarded the highest military honors, the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honor at a ceremony where her work as a spy was revealed. Josephine, teary-eyed, said, “I am proud to be French because this is the only place in the world where I can realize my dream.”