The decade of exclusion from the United States that followed was not a decade of silence. Baker continued performing in Europe, continued speaking publicly about civil rights from a European platform, and continued demonstrating, through her personal conduct and her public statements, the specific relationship she saw between the racial ideology she had fought against in the war and the racial ideology she was fighting against in America.
The March on Washington appearance in 1963 — after her work visa had been restored and she was again able to enter the country — was both a personal and a symbolic return. She was fifty-seven years old. She had been part of the global conversation about civil rights for over a decade. And she stood at the Lincoln Memorial, in her Free French Air Force uniform, and spoke to 250,000 people about what she had seen and what she believed.
The uniform was not incidental. It was the same uniform she had been photographed in throughout the war; it was the uniform of a person who had served, and been recognized for serving, in a context in which the racial ideology she was now opposing had been the declared enemy. The visual argument of the uniform — this is what it looks like to have contributed to defeating fascism, and I am here, now, to say that the work is not finished — was coherent and clear.
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## The Children
The twelve children that Josephine Baker adopted and raised in the Château des Milandes — the Rainbow Tribe she described as her experiment in brotherhood — came from a range of backgrounds that she selected deliberately.