After King’s assassination in April 1968, Coretta Scott King reached out to Baker and asked whether she would consider leading the Civil Rights Movement. Baker declined. Her children, she said, were too young to lose their mother. The specific nature of that reasoning — the calculation of risk, the responsibility to her family balanced against the demand of a larger cause — reflected the same kind of thinking she had done in 1939 when she agreed to work for French intelligence.
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## The Last Performance
In April 1975, Josephine Baker opened a retrospective show at the Bobino theater in Paris, marking the fiftieth anniversary of her 1925 Paris debut. The production had been financed partly by Prince Rainier and Princess Grace of Monaco and partly by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, whose friendship with Baker spanned decades.
Sophia Loren attended. So did Princess Grace. The opening night audience gave her the reception she had been given throughout her career in Paris — overwhelming, sustained, evidence of the specific relationship she had built with the city over fifty years. The reviews were extraordinary. She was sixty-eight years old, and by all accounts she had not lost the capacity to hold an audience.
Four days after the opening, on April 12, 1975, Josephine Baker died in her sleep at a hospital in Paris. The cause of death was a cerebral hemorrhage. She was surrounded by reviews of that final show.
More than 20,000 people lined the streets of Paris for her funeral procession. The French government provided a 21-gun salute. She became the first American-born woman to receive full French military honors at her funeral. She was buried in Monaco, where she had been living with her family in the villa provided by Princess Grace.