She named her four marriages across the decades: to Willie Wells at thirteen, to Willie Howard Baker at fifteen (whose name she kept), to Jean Lion in 1937 (whose citizenship she gained), and to Jo Bouillon, a French orchestra leader, in 1947. It was with Bouillon that she raised the Rainbow Tribe through the 1950s and early 1960s, though the marriage eventually ended.
The Château des Milandes became the central project of her postwar life — the physical expression of a philosophy that had been developing since the East St. Louis fire she had witnessed as a child, through the racial limitations she had faced in America, through the specific choice of France as the country where she could live the life she wanted. The estate was expensive to maintain; she poured money into it at a rate that eventually outpaced her income. In the late 1960s, unable to meet her debts, she lost the château. By her account, she was physically removed from the property by bailiffs. Princess Grace of Monaco — who had been a friend since the early 1950s — arranged for Baker and her family to move to a villa in the south of France.
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## Civil Rights in America
Josephine Baker’s return to the United States after the war — tentative, episodic, and always complicated by the country’s racial structure — produced some of the most consequential episodes of her postwar life.
In 1951 she refused to perform at a segregated Miami nightclub until the management agreed to desegregate the audience. The club complied. The incident was both a personal act of principle and a demonstration that her celebrity gave her leverage to challenge the architecture of American segregation in ways that most Black Americans did not have available to them.