Adoptive Affinities: Josephine Baker’s Humanist International

It appears to me […] that if you choose to call these strange creatures of yours related, the relationship is not so much a relationship of blood as of soul or of spirit. It is in the way in which we see all really deep friendship arise among men, opposite peculiarities of disposition being what best makes internal union possible.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities (1807)

In September 1948, a young former Air Force pilot named Garry Davis walked into the United Nations meeting at the Place de Trocadero in Paris and declared himself a citizen of the world. Earlier that year, Davis had renounced his U.S. citizenship and had been ordered out of France by the French government as a sans papiers. When the United Nations delegations assembled in Paris that fall, their temporary residency in the Palais de Chaillot officially became international territory. Davis thus claimed, upon entering the building, that he had emigrated, and began issuing proclamations about the need for a world government and about the inherent violence of individual nations. As Davis stated on the U.N. floor in November 1948, “the sovereign states you represent divide us and lead us to the Abyss of Total War.” ¹

Davis’s symbolic acts were both an appeal and a challenge to the humanistic mission of the fledgling United Nations, a product of the Second World War, whose charter had been signed only three years previously, in 1945. In particular, Davis’s act looked toward the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the General Assembly was currently in the process of ratifying and which would be adopted on December 10, 1948. Demanding that the U.N. hold true to its founding promise to “practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbors,” Davis called upon the U.N. “to convene forthwith a world constituent Assembly to raise the standard around which all men can gather, the standard of true peace, of one government for one world.” ²

The United Nations, of course, rejected Davis’s plea, although his cause found widespread popular support, as well as the endorsement of a substantial number of leading intellectuals, including Albert Camus, Richard Wright, André Breton, and a large number of Surrealists. As Breton wrote, commending but also radicalizing Davis’s position, “evil … resides in the compartmentalization of the world by nations and more or less disguised empires. It is this nationalism, drunk and still thirsting for blood, that today we must arrest wherever it exists; it is this rival imperialism of Coca-Cola and distorted Marxism that we must prevent from consuming the sacrifice of our lives.” ³ As Breton’s language suggests, Davis’s world citizenship fused the broad humanistic project of an international body like the United Nations with the post-Stalinist left’s efforts to find new forms of internationalism to replace the nationalisms, colonialisms, and imperialisms they rejected as engines of domination and violence. The pragmatic impossibility of the United Nations supplanting all world governments revealed the idealism, if not the naïveté, of Davis’s actions. All the same, his notions of world citizenship remind us how broadly such acts of militant humanism resounded in the political environment of the years that marked the end of World War Two and the onset of the Cold War.

It is within the context of such appeals to the institutionalization of global tolerance that I wish to examine Josephine Baker’s own humanistic project, her efforts to establish the village of Les Milandes in Dordogne as what she called La capitale du monde de la fraternité [The world capital of brotherhood]. With her husband, Jo Bouillon, Baker purchased the chateau and much of the village of Les Milandes in December 1947, which they began restoring. In November 1948, she brought her mother, sister, and brother-in-law from St. Louis to live in the chateau. The chateau did not, however, become the world capital of brotherhood right away. After a fraught tour of the U.S. in 1951, marked by the infamous Stork Club incident in which Baker was refused service at the prestigious restaurant and was then slandered in the press, Baker became increasingly militant in the use of her celebrity to fight segregation in the U.S. During the next two years, her civil rights activism was concomitant with her world tour, with Baker appearing at numerous rallies and giving speeches in the U.S., Cuba, Latin America, and France. And then her political tactics changed. In 1953, she adopted Akio, a Korean orphan, while on tour in Japan. She and Jo Bouillon adopted eight more children between 1953 and 1956, reaching a total of twelve children by 1962. These children became Baker’s famous “rainbow tribe,” memorialized in countless newspapers and magazine articles, as well as in a children’s book Baker had published in 1957. With the chateau of Les Milandes as the home base of this collection of ethnically and religiously diverse children, Baker promoted her village in Dordogne as a global village. As she wrote in closing a personal letter to Jo Bouillon in 1968, even as the chateau was about to be auctioned off for its debts, Les Milandes “represents the ideal of brotherhood symbolized by the children.” ⁴

1. See Garry Davis’s online archive (http://www.garrydavis.org/archive.html).[↑]
2. UN Charter; Davis, Oran Declaration, Nov. 22, 1948.[↑]
3. Breton, “La Paix par nous-mêmes,” Franc-tireur, ctd. in José Pierre, ed. Tracts surréalistes et déclarations collectives, Volume 2 (1939-1969). Paris: Terrain Vague, 1982.[↑]
4. Letter from Josephine Baker to Jo Bouillon, Josephine Baker archives, Emory University Special Collections.[↑]