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## St. Louis, 1906: Where It Started
Freda Josephine McDonald was born on June 3, 1906, in St. Louis, Missouri. Her father, Eddie Carson, a vaudeville drummer, left shortly after her birth. Her mother, Carrie McDonald, worked as a washerwoman and struggled to support the family. By the time Josephine was eight years old, she was working as a live-in domestic servant for wealthy white families in St. Louis, cleaning houses and doing laundry in exchange for room, board, and a few dollars a week.
The families she worked for were often unkind. One employer, by her later account, dipped her hands in boiling water as punishment. She left school at twelve. She ran away from home at thirteen, working as a waitress and sleeping where she could. She married for the first time at thirteen — the marriage lasted less than a year — and again at fifteen, to a man named Willie Baker, whose surname she kept for the rest of her life even as she discarded the marriage itself.
St. Louis in the first decades of the twentieth century was a city defined by racial segregation and simmering violence. In the summer of 1917, when Josephine Baker was eleven years old, one of the worst episodes of racial violence in American history erupted just across the Mississippi River in East St. Louis, Illinois. White workers, angry about the employment of Black laborers, attacked Black neighborhoods. Homes were burned. People were shot and beaten. The death toll — estimates ranged from 39 to over 100, depending on the source and the period — made the East St. Louis massacre one of the bloodiest episodes of racial violence in the country’s history.