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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

37. She Had to Work as a Child

St. Louis in the early twentieth century. Monovision

Josephine Baker’s purported father abandoned the family soon after her birth. Soon thereafter, her mother married a nice man, with whom she had three more children. However, Baker’s stepfather had trouble getting or hanging on to a job, and his chronic unemployment forced the family ever deeper into poverty. Her mother took in laundry, and at age eight, Baker pitched in to help make ends meet by working as a live-in domestic and babysitter for white families, who often instructed the black child not to “kiss the baby”. Her employers were sometimes abusive, such as the one who burned Josephine’s hands as punishment for putting too much soap in the laundry.

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.