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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

11. She Adopted a Dozen Children

Josephine Baker’s adopted children, or ‘The Rainbow Tribe’. Getty Images

Today, there is nothing unusual about celebrities adopting children of ethnicities other than their own. Things were different, however, back in the 1950s, when Josephine Baker started adopting orphaned children from all over the world. In a bid to combat racism and set an example, she started off by adopting two Japanese orphans, then kept adopting more and more kids, from different countries and ethnicities. As she put it, she wanted to demonstrate that: “children of different ethnicities and religions could still be brothers“.

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.