The street corner dancing that Baker began as a young teenager was not simply entertainment or creative expression, though it was both of those things. It was also a survival strategy. She was living on the streets of St. Louis at thirteen, having run away from a home situation she described as untenable, and the ability to draw coins from passersby through dancing and performance was a form of income. The transition from street performance to traveling troupes and eventually to Broadway was not a sharp break; it was a gradual professionalizing of skills she had been developing since childhood because those skills put food in front of her.
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## Vaudeville and the Structure of Black American Entertainment
The entertainment world that the young Josephine Baker entered in her mid-teens — the world of vaudeville circuits, traveling troupes, and the specific infrastructure of Black American performance in the early twentieth century — was a complex and in some ways surprisingly sophisticated ecosystem operating within and around the constraints of American racial segregation.
The major vaudeville circuits were largely segregated. The Theater Owners Booking Association, known among Black performers variously as “TOBA” and, bitterly, as “Tough On Black Asses,” was the main booking network for Black entertainers performing for Black audiences in the South and parts of the Midwest. It offered steady work at modest wages, and it was the professional training ground for a generation of Black performers — musicians, dancers, comedians, singers — who went on to define American popular culture in the mid-twentieth century.