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Friends, to me for years St. Louis represented a city of fear... humiliation... misery and terror... A city where in the eyes of the white man a Negro should know his place and had better stay in it.

Josephine Baker

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Josephine Baker
Age: 68 †
Born: 1906
Born: June 3
Died: 1975
Died: April 12
Actor
Dancer
Film Actor
Jazz Musician
Model
Singer
Street Artist
Vedette
St. Louis
Missouri
Freda Josephine McDonald
Joséphine Baker
Place
City
Better
Stay
Years
Cities
Louis
Men
Eyes
Represented
Friends
Negro
Eye
Humiliation
White
Terror
Fear
Misery

More quotes by Josephine Baker

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The white imagination is sure something when it comes to blacks.
Josephine Baker
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Oh, you young people act like old men. You have no fun.
Josephine Baker
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What am I most ashamed of in my life? Not keeping my promise to my sister and being too scared of America to attend her funeral.
Josephine Baker
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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.
Josephine Baker
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You are on the eve of a complete victory. You can't go wrong. The world is behind you.
Josephine Baker
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The old Catholic parties hounded me with a Christian hatred from station to station, city to city, one stage to another.
Josephine Baker
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The things we truly love stay with us always, locked in our hearts as long as life remains.
Josephine Baker
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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
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When I was a child and they burned me out of my home, I was frightened and I ran away. Eventually I ran far away. It was to a place called France. Many of you have been there, and many have not. But I must tell you, ladies and gentlemen, in that country I never feared. It was like a fairyland place.
Josephine Baker
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We must change the system of education and instruction. Unfortunately, history has shown us that brotherhood must be learned, when it should be natural.
Josephine Baker
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I have never really been a great artist. I have been a human being that has loved art, which is not the same thing. But I have loved and believed in art and the idea of universal brotherhood so much, that I have put everything I have into them, and I have been blessed.
Josephine Baker
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I was learning the importance of names - having them, making them - but at the same time I sensed the dangers. Recognition was followed by oblivion, a yawning maw whose victims disappeared without a trace.
Josephine Baker
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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.
Josephine Baker
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All my life, I have maintained that the people of the world can learn to live together in peace if they are not brought up in prejudice.
Josephine Baker
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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.
Josephine Baker
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...It looked very different from the Statue of Liberty, but what did that matter? What was the good of having the statue without the liberty, the freedom to go where one chose if one was held back by one's color? No, I preferred the Eiffel Tower, which made no promises. ~ Josephine Baker, once she had seen the Eiffel Tower
Josephine Baker
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I spent 30 minutes each morning rubbing my body with half a lemon to lighten my skin.
Josephine Baker
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My people have a country of their own to go to if they choose... Africa... but, this America belongs to them just as much as it does to any of the white race... in some ways even more so, because they gave the sweat of their brow and their blood in slavery so that many parts of America could become prosperous and recognized in the world.
Josephine Baker
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Art is an elastic sort of love.
Josephine Baker
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Each time I leaped I seemed to touch the sky and when I regained earth it seemed to be mine alone.
Josephine Baker