(ANSA) - PARIS, NOV 27 - Josephine Baker, the Franco-American dancer, singer and actress who hypnotized France with shows that mocked colonialism and chased after, joined the French Resistance, will become the first black woman to be immortalized next Tuesday in the French mausoleum of the Pantheon.
Baker will also be the sixth woman to join some 80 great national figures in French history at the secular temple on the Left Bank in Paris. He will also be the first figure of the show to be honored with a symbolic place in the centuries-old sanctuary, the final resting place of a long list of illuminaries from the worlds of politics, culture and science, including Victor Hugo, Emile Zola and Marie Curie.
The "pantheonization" of the world's first black superstar, who campaigned for civil rights alongside Martin Luther King, crowns years of campaigning for her family and a group of intellectuals to be bestowed on her posthumous honor. French President Emmanuel Macron finally granted the request "because she is a black American woman in a closed society ... who has become the embodiment of the Enlightenment values of the French Republic throughout her life," her office explained this week.
Born Freda Josephine McDonald in extreme poverty in Missourin in 1906, Baker left school at 13.
After two broken marriages - she took the name Baker from her second husband - she managed to land a place in one of the first all-black Broadway musicals in 1921. Like many black American artists of the time, she moved to France to escape racial segregation.
(HANDLE).