Today we think of Josephine Baker as the personification of the Jazz Age – the skinny black kid from Missouri who took Paris by storm. In retrospect, her show-stopping Revue Nègre act can be read as a subversion of the prejudices of her age. At the time, however, it just looked like a heady cocktail of comedy, exoticism and sex. Scantily garlanded with feathers, dancing to ‘barbaric, syncopated music’, Baker was ‘black poetry’, according to Marcel Sauvage, who acted as her ghostwriter.

The fact that she had got to Paris at all was testament to her resilience and spirit. Born into poverty in St Louis in 1906, Baker never knew who her real father was. By the age of eight she was working as a maid. At eleven, she witnessed the devastating racist violence of the East St Louis massacre. Two years later, having dropped out of school, she was scraping together a living dancing on street corners. She was married – the first time at only thirteen – and divorced twice before she was twenty.

Racism was an inescapable theme of her life. One of her early dancing jobs was at the Plantation Club, a Harlem nightclub decorated to resemble the antebellum South and only open to white patrons; perhaps this experience helped inspire the colonial backdrop for her Folies Bergère acts. As a chorus girl at the end of the line, the exuberant fifteen-year-old Baker learned to attract attention by pulling funny faces. Moving to Paris at nineteen, she became a global celebrity and discovered in France a true home. It wasn’t just that Parisians appreciated her deficiencies of costume; to her delight they found the colour of her skin beautiful.

The first section of her memoir Fearless and Free, newly translated by Anam Zafar and Sophie Lewis, chronicles this period. It captures a girl – kind, charismatic, mischievous and full of laughter – with barely any education revelling in success and the trappings it brought her. Between dances she would bottle-feed her pet goat Toutoute. Her reminiscences are often as charming as they are rambling and vague.

She describes, too, the tours, during which she met frequent hostility with courtesy and grace. Greeted in Vienna with church-organised demonstrations over her supposed wickedness, she opened her show with a spiritual, ‘Sleep, My Poor Baby’, ‘from back in the slave times when Negroes were good for nothing but dying from exhaustion and despair after being beaten by their very Christian owners’. Then she began dancing

like I always have and always will, not thinking about good or evil but only about my dance, my honest and ever so pure dance, to show humankind and God – who I’ve been assured is the God of all people whether they’re white, black, yellow or red – that there is a youthfulness that is free, eternal and forever, in spite of everything, a great and simple joie de vivre that’s enough in itself. 

As her performance style developed, she began wearing larger costumes and discovered she could sing, starring in a highly acclaimed revival of Offenbach’s opera La Créole in 1934. She became the first black woman to star in a movie. Always, she refused to appear in front of segregated audiences or with all-white casts and orchestras.

Determined to play her part for her beloved adopted country during the war, Baker swore she would never sing in Paris while the Germans were there and performed tirelessly for Allied soldiers. Her extensive travels in Europe in the 1930s and the vile treatment she had received in Nazi Germany meant she had no illusions about what Hitler’s success would mean. ‘When soldiers applaud me, I like to believe they will never acquire a hatred for colored people because of the cheer I have brought them,’ she told one reporter. ‘It may be foolish, but it’s the way I feel.’

In Josephine Baker’s Secret War, Hanna Diamond meticulously documents Baker’s clandestine war work for the Free French using previously unseen sources. Employing her celebrity as cover, she was able to move almost freely through Spain, Portugal, the Middle East and North Africa. Officers and diplomats from Axis and Allied forces competed to meet her wherever she went, so she had unique access to intelligence. She hid her reports from customs officials by pinning them to the inside of her clothes or using invisible ink on her scores. After the Americans landed in North Africa in November 1942, Baker became a key point of contact between Allied and Moroccan leaders, many of whom had become her friends.

Her war work informed the civil rights activism that defined her later years, which, with Sauvage, she recorded in her memoirs. Like so many African Americans who had served loyally in both world wars, Baker was devastated when she visited the United States in the late 1940s and 1950s to discover that black people were still segregated. ‘Are we just bugs to these good Americans?’ she demanded. In 1951, she was refused service at New York’s Stork Club; Grace Kelly, who witnessed her dignity at the restaurant, became a devoted friend after this incident. Proudly dressed in her army uniform, she was the only female speaker at the 1963 March on Washington.

The mature activist and devoted Gaullist may seem a far cry from the uninhibited performer who dazzled 1920s Paris, but, as these complementary books show, she was always politically engaged, as well as sexy, funny, bold and irreverent. Her career-defining banana belt act at the Folies Bergère in 1926 may have made the older generation choke over their barley water but they were missing the point. She wasn’t trying to corrupt anyone. Instead, she was poking fun at outdated prejudices which the younger generation was starting to shake off. From the start, she understood that, delivered with a smile and a shimmy, her message would be irresistible.