A new mural of US-French entertainer and civil rights activist Josephine Baker, by artist Franck Duval, aka FKDL, is displayed in Paris, Saturday, July 19, 2025.
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France
Paris is reviving the spirit of U.S.-French entertainer and civil rights activist Josephine Baker with a new mural.
Fifty years after her death, Baker now gazes out over a various, bustling neighborhood of northeast Paris, on account of urban artist FKDL and a road artwork competition aimed at promoting community spirit.
Baker’s son, Brian, used to be most modern at the unveiling on Saturday to examine the mural depicting his mother’s face.
Baker adopted 12 teenagers from spherical the arena that she called her ”rainbow tribe.”
He acknowledged: “I feel moved and I feel happy because this is part of a memory of my mother.”
The mural of Baker, meant to tell freedom and resistance, is among several painted in most modern days in the neighborhood and arranged by the association Ourcq Living Colours.
Baker used to be the main Dim girl inducted into France’s Pantheon, joining such luminaries as thinker Voltaire, scientist Marie Curie and author Victor Hugo.
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Baker turned into a celebrity in the Thirties, in particular in France, where she moved in 1925 as she sought to wing racism and segregation in the United States.
In addition to her stage reputation, Baker additionally spied on the Nazis for the French Resistance and marched alongside Martin Luther King Jr. in Washington. She died in Paris in 1975.
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