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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

38. She Rose From Extreme Poverty

The glitter and glamour of theater and the stage did not mask the fact that Josephine Baker’s parents struggled to make ends meet. She was raised in poverty in a low income neighborhood that consisted mostly of boarding houses, whorehouses, and apartments without running water or indoor plumbing. Growing up, Baker often went hungry, and was always poorly dressed in second or third hand hand-me-downs. Playing with other urchins in the railyard and along the tracks, she developed street smarts, that served her well in her future career.

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.