The tribute ceremony started with Baker’s song “Me revoilà Paris” (“Paris, I’m Back”). “They were her public, people who really loved her,” he said. “Mum would not have accepted to enter into the Pantheon if that was not as the symbol of all the forgotten people of history, the minorities.”īouillon added that what moved him the most were the people who gathered along the street in front of the Pantheon to watch. “Mum would have been very happy,” Akio Bouillon, Baker’s son, said after the ceremony. Nine of them attended Tuesday’s ceremony among the 2,000 guests.
She is not only praised for her world-renowned artistic career but also for her active role in the French Resistance during World War II, her actions as a civil rights activist and her humanist values, which she displayed through the adoption of her 12 children from all over the world. “Josephine Baker, you are entering into the Pantheon because, (despite) born American, there is no greater French (woman) than you,” he said.īaker was also the first American-born citizen and the first performer to be immortalized into the Pantheon. Josephine Baker fought so many battles with lightness, freedom, joy.” Her body stayed in Monaco at the request of her family.įrench President Emmanuel Macron paid tribute to “a war hero, fighter, dancer, singer a Black woman defending Black people but first of all, a woman defending humankind.
Baker’s military medals lay atop the cenotaph, which was draped in the French tricolor flag and contained soil from her birthplace in Missouri, from France, and from her final resting place in Monaco. Military officers from the Air Force carried her cenotaph along a red carpet that stretched for four blocks of cobblestoned streets from the Luxembourg Gardens to the Pantheon. Baker joined other French luminaries honored at the site, including philosopher Voltaire, scientist Marie Curie and writer Victor Hugo.
PARIS (AP) - Josephine Baker - the U.S.-born entertainer, anti-Nazi spy and civil rights activist - was inducted into France’s Pantheon on Tuesday, becoming the first Black woman to receive the nation’s highest honor.īaker’s voice resonated through streets of Paris’ famed Left Bank as recordings from her extraordinary career kicked off an elaborate ceremony at the domed Pantheon monument.