Josephine Baker, Racial Protest, and the Cold War

Abstract

During the early 1950s, Josephine Baker was an international star who lived in a castle in France, who wore Dior gowns in concert, and whose most radical political idea seems to have been a hope that the world might some day live in racial harmony. She would hardly seem a threat to the national security of the United States. Nevertheless, during the early fifties, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) kept a file on Baker, and the State Department collected data on her activities, using the information to dissuade other countries from allowing her to perform. Baker was seen as a threat because she used her international prominence to call attention to the discriminatory racial practices of the United States, her native land, when she traveled throughout the world. Baker was caught in the cross fire of the Cold War in Latin America in the early 1950s. Her seemingly simple campaign for racial tolerance made her the target of a campaign that ultimately pushed her from the limelight of the exclusive club circuit to the bright lights of a Cuban interrogation room. The woman lauded in Havana and Miami in 1951 as an international star was arrested by the Cuban military police two years later as a suspected Communist, but she had undergone no radical political transformation in the interim. That Josephine Baker engendered an international campaign to mute her impact is a demonstration of the lengths to which the United States and its allies would go to silence Cold War critics. More important, however, Josephine Baker found herself at the center of a critical cultural and ideological weak point in American Cold War diplomacy: the intersection of race and Cold War foreign relations.1