The same year she was refused service at the Stork Club in New York City — one of the most famous and fashionable restaurants of the era. The incident received substantial press coverage. Grace Kelly, who was at the Stork Club that evening, reportedly walked out with Baker in protest. The NAACP named Baker its Woman of the Year in recognition of her civil rights activities.
The U.S. government responded to her activism not with recognition but with restriction. Her work visa was suspended, barring her from performing in the United States for approximately a decade. The specific mechanism of this restriction — the intersection of Cold War politics, domestic racial politics, and the specific vulnerability of a foreign-born entertainer who depended on visa approvals — was a demonstration of the coercive power available to authorities who wanted to silence a voice they found inconvenient.
She spent much of the 1950s in Europe, raising the Rainbow Tribe, performing, and speaking publicly about civil rights from a European platform.
In August 1963, she returned to Washington, D.C., for the March on Washington — the mass demonstration organized by civil rights leaders that drew more than 250,000 people to the National Mall and provided the backdrop for Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Baker was the only official female speaker at the march. She spoke in her Free French Air Force uniform — the same uniform she had worn on the day Paris was liberated nineteen years earlier.
Her speech addressed directly the connections between her experience of American racism, her choice of France as her home, and her commitment to the civil rights movement. She spoke as someone who had seen what racism produced — the fire across the river in 1917, the hostile reviews in New York in 1936, the Stork Club refusal in 1951 — and who had spent decades living proof that the alternative the movement was demanding was possible.