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40 Fascinating Facts About the Fabulous Josephine Baker

Khalid Elhassan July 2, 2019 24 min

Josephine Baker - Josephine Baker - Chanter L'amour

21. She Got No Love in 1930s America

Josephine Baker performing in the Ziegfeld Follies, 1936. Pintrest

While European audiences embraced and adored Baker, American ones did not. In 1936, she returned to her homeland to star in the Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway, but it turned into a disaster. A black woman with so much sophistication and power was anathema to American audiences, who roundly rejected her, and to the media, which ran scathing reviews of her. Time magazine, for example, dismissed her as a “Negro minx”. The box office numbers were unimpressive, and Baker ended up getting replaced.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.