Welcome to Karen Hunter's awesome. Today is June 3rd, June 3rd, 26. And today I want to honor the birth of Josephine Baker.

She was born this day in 1906 in St. Louis, St. Louis, the Lou.

And I was thinking about a woman born a couple of generations.

Her mother's parents were enslaved.

I think about this woman who was born without

rights, not the right to vote, not the right to move about the cabin freely. I mean, Missouri, still Jim Crow,

the precipice of the lynchings and all of the trauma and terror

that was exacted upon black people, she was embroiled in that as well.

And I think about a woman born in a time when to be a black woman had to be really hard.

It says in 1917 when she was 11, Josephine McDonald, that was her name, Frida Josephine

McDonald, witnessed at the age of 11 a racial uprising, racial violence, racial terrorism, and East St. Louis.

In a speech years later, she would say, I can see myself standing on the West Bank of the Mississippi

looking over into East St. Louis and watching the glow of the burning Negro homes lighting the

sky. We children stood huddled together in

bewilderment, frightened to death with the screams of Negro families running across the bridge

with nothing but what they had on their backs as their worldly belongings. So with this vision,

I ran and ran and ran. I think about Josephine Baker, as we also talk about

the decimation of Black Wall Street, Tulsa, Oklahoma, Greenwood, that burning people out was

commonplace in the United States of America, as America looks to celebrate 250 years.

This is part of the history, right?

And Josephine Baker witnessed it.

But those of us who witness the terror, those of us who stand witness, and then our lives

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