Black Americans in France

One of the challenges of discussing the black presence in France from the nineteenth century to the present is to know where to begin and how to limit the research so that it can convey the core of the experience. The fact that Dumas père, who was born in Haiti and died in 1870, was a Creole and fathered Dumas fils, who was active in the French theatre until the 1890s, is one aspect of this; the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who traveled in France and liked Paris, complained that père was never an advocate of the Negro race (Fabre, 1991; also Phillips, 1975b). But such basic facts are not remarkable, for black heritage has been a feature of American and European culture more generally. Bennett, for example, notes that miscegenation in America "started not in the thirteen original colonies but in Africa" (1966, p. 242) among white slave traders who impregnated abducted African women, adding that European colonial slavers arrived in an Africa that had for centuries been accustomed to the societal mixing

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a part of the Negro culture in Paris, which in turn was a central fixture of American culture in the Paris of the twenties (Longstreet, 1972), by the time Baker arrived in the mid-1920s, performing a specialty, almost stereotypical, number titled "Danse Sauvage," set in an African jungle, and the following years starring at the Folies Bergere. Baker made a permanent home in France until her death in 1975, mainstreaming her musical acts in France's popular culture and from time to time drawing fire and condemnation from the American government because of her outspoken criticism of American racism during the Cold War. Rose's judgment is that although Baker overcame racial stereotypes in France in a way that would have been much more difficult in the U.S., Baker was prone to reinventing her persona "multiplying stories to suit her purposes," whether political or artistic (Rose, 1989, p. 268). However, it would be misleading to characterize the black experience in France after the war as entirely engaged by the arts. It is to the wider culture that we now turn. The American political activist W.E.B. du Bois, as is well known, was a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1910. He became in
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Approximate Word count = 3104
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page)

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