Persons [ ] To realise our dreams we must decide to wake up | Josephine Baker, 1906-1975
Josephine Baker, 1938
“To realise our dreams we must decide to wake up.”
“I’m not intimidated by anyone. Everyone is made with two arms, two legs, a stomach and a head. Just think about that.”
‘You are on the eve of a complete victory. You can’t go wrong. The world is behind you.”
“You must get an education. You must go to school, and you must learn to protect yourself. And you must learn to protect yourself with the pen, and not the gun.”
Josephine Baker, 1920s
“Surely the day will come when color means nothing more than the skin tone, when religion is seen uniquely as a way to speak one’s soul; when birth places have the weight of a throw of the dice and all men are born free, when understanding breeds love and brotherhood.”
“I have walked into the palaces of kings and queens and into the houses of presidents. And much more. But I could not walk into a hotel in America and get a cup of coffee, and that made me mad.”
“I believe if the white and colored people could get together and be let alone, they would understand each other and consequently love each other.”
George Hoyningen-Huene, Josephine Baker, 1929
“One day I realized I was living in a country where I was afraid to be black. It was only a country for white people. Not black. So I left. I had been suffocating in the United States… A lot of us left, not because we wanted to leave, but because we couldn’t stand it anymore… I felt liberated in Paris.”
‘Let us stop saying ‘white Americans’ and ‘colored Americans,’ let us try once and for all saying… Americans. Let human beings be equal on Earth as in Heaven.”
“Is that what they call a vocation, what you do with joy as if you had fire in your heart, the devil in your body?”
“Each time I leaped I seemed to touch the sky and when I regained earth it seemed to be mine alone.”
George Hoyningen-Huene, Josephine Baker, 1929
“The things we truly love stay with us always, locked in our hearts as long as life remains.”
“The secret to the fountain of youth is to think youthful thoughts.”
“Sex was a pleasurable form of exercise, like dancing.”
“Art is an elastic sort of love.”
“I shall dance all my life. . . . I would like to die,
breathless, spent, at the end of a dance.”
Josephine Baker, 1906-1975
Also:
Le Tumulte Noir (The Black Craze) | Paul Colin’s Jazz Age Portfolio, 1925-27
