Josephine Baker

Born in St. Louis in 1906, Freda Josephine McDonald left America and became the sensation of Paris in 1927 when her Folies Bergère performance — beaded necklace, banana skirt, nothing else — stopped the city cold. She starred in Siren of the Tropics that same year, the first Black woman to lead a major motion picture, and the era's artists called her the Black Venus, the Bronze Venus, the Creole Goddess. She married French industrialist Jean Lion in 1937, renounced her U.S. citizenship, and became French. During World War II she aided the Resistance and worked with British and American intelli…