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## What the Uniform Meant
Throughout her postwar life — at the March on Washington in 1963, at her Carnegie Hall return in 1973, and finally in the costume she was buried in — Josephine Baker wore her Free French Air Force uniform.
The uniform was not a performance costume and it was not a nostalgic prop. It was a document: evidence of a formal relationship between Baker and France, expressed in the standard material form through which military service is documented and displayed. It said: I served. I was recognized. This is what that looked like.
In the context of postwar France, the uniform carried specific weight. France’s experience of the war — the defeat, the occupation, the collaboration of the Vichy government, the Resistance, the liberation — had produced an ongoing national conversation about who had done what during the occupation years, a conversation that was complicated by the fact that the most heroic narrative (the whole of France resisting) was not supported by the actual history (a substantial portion of France, including the official government, collaborating). The people who could document genuine Resistance service occupied a specific position of moral authority in this conversation.
Baker’s uniform placed her unambiguously in the legitimate Resistance category. She had been there, she had served, she had been recognized. The uniform said all of that at a glance, without requiring the narrative that the history contained. She wore it to the March on Washington because she wanted the American audience to understand that the person speaking to them was not simply a celebrity lending her name to a cause; she was a veteran of the military struggle against the specific ideology she was asking them to continue opposing.