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 intelligence, her role declassified only in 2020; after the war de Gaulle named her Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. She adopted twelve children she called the Rainbow Tribe, refused to perform for segregated American audiences, and was offered unofficial leadership of the civil rights movement in 1968 after King's assassination - she declined for her children's sake. She died in 1975 and in 2021 was inducted into the Panthéon, the first Black woman so honored, her body still in Monaco, a cenotaph standing in her place.