Chanteuse Josephine Baker honored with US stamp
NEW YORK (AFP) — The US Postal Service (USPS), which last year lost a legal battle after refusing to mail postcards with a topless image of US-born chanteuse Josephine Baker, is honoring the late African-American with a stamp of her own on Wednesday.
The stamp reproduces a poster from the 1935 French film "Princess Tam-Tam" that featured the sultry star -- this time with her bosom covered -- who emigrated to France where she took much of Europe by storm after encountering racism in her home country.
The image is part of a commemorative series of US postage stamps honoring vintage black cinema that will be unveiled at a ceremony in Newark, New Jersey on Wednesday.
They serve as "invaluable pieces of history, preserving memories of cultural phenomena that otherwise might have been forgotten," said USPS vice president Delores Killette in a statement Tuesday.
"My adoptive mother, whose theme song was Two loves Have I, my Country and Paris,' would be delighted, thrilled and deeply moved by this wonderful tribute to African-American culture," Baker's adopted son Jean-Claude Baker said in the statement.
After a protracted but eventually triumphant free-speech battle supported by the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), Mr. Baker was allowed in May 2007 to mail 15,000 postcards to patrons of "Chez Josephine," his New York restaurant opened 22 years ago in honor of his adopted mother.
The USPS had refused to accept and mail the cards, which featured a 1926 watercolor by Henry Fournier depicting Baker as a topless Follies-Bergere dancer, on the basis that they were "pornographic", according to the NYCLU.
But the Baker son held firm and eventually prevailed in his case, earning his right to send the cards and an apology from the USPS.
"If it had been a photo of Josephine, a black and white photo, there would not have been a case, but it was a work of art, by an artist, and I knew that I had a legal right (to send it by mail) in the United States," Baker told AFP.
Josephine Baker was born in 1906 in St. Louis, Missouri, where she came face to face with discrimination, including in theaters where blacks were barred from sitting in the same areas as whites.
After achieving fame in Europe she often returned to the United States to help with the civil rights movement, and joined the Reverend Martin Luther King at the landmark 1963 march on Washington.
