Josephine Baker collection

1933-1975

Born in 1906 in St. Louis, Missouri, Josephine Baker, a dancer and singer, achieved fame in Paris in the 1920s. In the 1950s, she sought to promote racial equality by adopting twelve children of various races and nationalities to create what she called a "rainbow family". Miki Sawada was the founder and director of the Elizabeth Sanders Home in Tokyo for ostracized mixed-race children fathered by U.S. servicemen with Japanese women. She and Baker had become friends in the 1930s in Paris, where her husband, Renzo Sawada, was stationed as a diplomat. The collection consists of 25 letters and postcards written by the renown dancer and cabaret singer Josephine Baker to her Japanese friend Miki Sawada and other parties; a scrapbook of press clippings assembled by Sawada; and material from Baker's 1952 South American tour. The latter part of Baker's correspondence with Sawada was concerned with the adoption of a Japanese boy in 1954. Other materials in the collection include three speeches from her 1952 lecture tour in Argentina and Brazil to promote "the spiritual freedom of mankind" and an end to racial discrimination, and printed matter from her 1954 tour of Japan.