Josephine Baker left her home town of St. Louis, Missouri because the weekly lynchings just weren’t as funny as they used to be.

She went to Paris, where she became a jazz dance superstar and was celebrated and famous and did some undercover work for the French Resistance against the Nazis and so forth.

Meanwhile, back in her home town (as described by Howard Zinn in “The Twentieth Century: A People’s History”):

“African Americans had been hired to replace whites, and hysteria took hold (Job desperation was a common cause of mob violence, as when whites attacked Chinese miners in Rock Spring, Wyoming, in 1885, killing twenty-five). The black section of East St. Louis became the object of attack by a white mob, leaving 6,000 homeless, perhaps 200 blacks dead, and mangled bodies found floating in the Mississippi River.”

In response to the incident, Josephine Baker said of America…

…well, buy a Rabbit + Crow t-shirt and find out what she said.

Or you could buy a book and learn about it that way too, but come on, who are you kidding? A book? I don’t know about you, but I’m all about getting my history lessons from t-shirts these days. In fact, I always say: “If it won’t fit on a t-shirt, it isn’t worth learning.”

Josephine Baker’s comment about America is worth learning.