Post by @blogdiva@mastodon.social

Josephine Baker was awarded the Resistance Medal by the French Committee of National Liberation, the Croix de Guerre by the French military, and was named a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur.

she was incredibly proud of her #antifa work for France; and though white America was horrible to her she was a fiercely Black & Proud African American woman.

she was one of only 2 women to give a speech during the 1963 March On Washington, right before Martin Luther King Jr:
https://blackpast.org/african-american-history/1963-josephine-baker-speech-march-washington/

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a photo of Josephine Baker at the March on Washington podium, in full military regalia showing off her French Resistance bling and with a sea of people behind her

BlackPast.org

(1963) Josephine Baker, “Speech at the March on Washington”

Josephine Baker is remembered by most people as the flamboyant African American entertainer who earned fame and fortune in Paris in the 1920s. Yet through much of her later life, Baker became a vocal opponent of segregation and discrimination, often initiating one-woman protests against racial injustice. In 1963, at the age of 57, Baker flew in from France, her adopted homeland, to appear before the largest audience in her career, the 250,000 gathered at the March on Washington. Wearing her uniform of the French Resistance, of which she was active in World War II, she and Daisy Bates were the only women to address the audience. Baker spoke just before Dr. Martin Luther King gave his “I Have a Dream” oration. What she said appears below. Friends and family…you know I have lived a long time and I have come a long way. And you must know now that what I did, I did originally for myself. Then later, as these things began happening to me, I wondered if they were happening to you, and then I knew they must be. And I knew that you had no way to defend yourselves, as I had. And as I continued to […]

#antifa

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fediverse_user

@fediverse_user last yr.

@blogdiva I know the feelings she describes in her speech, I know them from 1rst hand personal experience, though I am not black myself. I know what it feels like to be excluded merely because of what you are, a girl, a worker’s child, a better student than most other kids from educated “bourgeois” backgrounds, a woman, and ‘worse’ a female scientist, still ‘worse’, from a modest background - why did I not want to leave my data to men stealing them from me, and why not allow sexual advances? 1/