Josephine Becker, the son of Freda Josephine Macdonald, was born in 1906 in Celuit, Missouri,

the United States.

A town, last month, Josephine Becker received one of the highest honors the nation of France

who can bestow on an individual.

President Emmanuel Macron inducted Baker into the Pantheon, the French national mausoleum

and resting place for heroes of the Republic.

Baker is the first black woman, the first American, and the first entertainer to receive

the honor.

Here is Macron's speech, as it's being translated on the news channel France 24.

Josephine Becker met Josephine Becker with a sense of freedom, liberty, gated, cheerfulness.

Josephine Becker was many things, a triple threat entertainer who sang, danced, and acted

on stage and screamed, a spy who undertook daring missions throughout World War II

Europe and a civil rights activist in the US.

And in the 1920s, she became one of the most famous black Americans who left the racism

and violence of the United States for a new life in Paris.

Another author Richard Wright wrote in 1951, quote, there is more freedom in one square

block of Paris than there is in the entire United States of America.

For decades, the French have welcomed these black artists and intellectuals, Americans

like James Baldwin and Nina Simone.

The country has held up this embrace as proof of French universalism.

The idea that equal citizenship in the nation trumps everything else, like race, ethnicity,

and gender.

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