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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

8. She Was Kicked Out of the US

The Stork Club incident ended up getting Josephine Baker kicked out of the US. She berated newspaper and gossip columnist Walter Winchell, and old acquaintance and one who had been in the Stork Club at the time, for not defending her. An infuriated Winchell retaliated by accusing Baker of being a communist sympathizer – a serious charge in the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War’s Red Scare and the McCarthyite hysteria. As a result, Baker’s work visa was terminated, and she had to leave the US. She was not allowed back into America for another decade.

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.