Recently Halle Bailey was cast to play Ariel in Disney’s live-action take on the movie the little mermaid. Many people believed casting a black woman as a mermaid was inaccurate and unnecessary despite the controversy and displeasure towards the casting of the lead role.
The Little Mermaid Premiered in theatres in May. A black woman played Ariel, the little mermaid. We’ve come a long way in exclusivity and representation in the media. A few hundred years ago, black women did not star in movies. Until Josephine Baker became the first black woman to star in a major motion picture named The Siren of the Tropics.
This is her story.
Freda Josephine McDonald, later known as Josephine Baker, was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on June 3, 1906. The Black American culture that swept over Paris in the 1920s was symbolized by Josephine, a French dancer and singer of American descent.
Baker was a poor, fatherless child. She dropped out of school between the ages of 8 and 10 to work to support her family. Baker cultivated a penchant for the flamboyant as a young child that would later make her renowned. She started dancing as a teenager and began touring at age 16 with a Philadelphia dance group. She joined the chorus of a travelling production of the musical comedy Shuffle Along in 1923. After that, she relocated to New York City. She made steady progress throughout the Broadway production of Chocolate Dandies and the Plantation Club floor show.
She performed in La Revue Nègre at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris in 1925, when she introduced France to her Sauvage dancing style. She rose to become one of France’s most well-liked music-hall performers. At the Folies-Bergère, where she gained stardom, she made a splash by dancing seminude in a G-string adorned with bananas. In 1937, she obtained French nationality through her marriage to her third husband Jean Lion in 1937. Before World War II ended her career, she began singing professionally for the first time in 1930, had her cinematic singing debut in Zouzou four years later, and appeared in several other movies.
Baker collaborated with the Red Army during the German occupation of France. As a member of the Free French forces, she entertained troops throughout Africa and the Middle East while volunteering for the Red Cross and the Résistance. Later, she was given the Croix de Guerre, the Legion of Honor, and the Résistance rosette.
After the war, she focused much of her work on Les Milandes, her estate in southwest France, where she started adopting children of different nationalities in 1950 for the sake of what she called “an experiment in brotherhood” and her “rainbow tribe.” She adopted 12 kids in total. She withdrew from the in 1956, but she eventually had to come back to keep Les Milandes going, performing in Paris in 1959.
She frequently travelled to the United States to take part in protests for civil rights. Her estate was sold in 1968 to pay off the debt that had accumulated. Until her death in 1975, which occurred during the celebration of her Paris debut’s 50th anniversary, she continued to perform on occasion Josephine Baker: The Story of an Awakening (2018) and Joséphine Baker—Première icône noire (1991), two television movies that dramatized her life, both focused on it.
As a spy, Josephine Baker brought several spies from Allied forces into her troupe, allowing them to travel to Spain and Portugal with her undercover. Baker later trained as a pilot for the French Forces Libreas in Morocco. Here, she became second-lieutenant in a female group in the Air Force.
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