A child playfully jumps into the water accumulated at a flooded area next to a house after rising water levels in the rivers caused flooding at Jhusi area of Allahabad on August 6, 2021. (Photo by Sanjay Kanojia/AFP Photo)

“Josephine Baker (June 3, 1906 – April 12, 1975) was an American-born French dancer, singer, and actress. Nicknamed the “Bronze Venus”, the “Black Pearl”, and even the “Créole Goddess” in anglophone nations.

Baker was the first African American female to star in a major motion picture and to integrate an American concert hall, and to become a world-famous entertainer. She is also noted for her contributions to the Civil Rights Movement in the United States (she was offered the unofficial leadership of the movement by Coretta Scott King in 1968 following Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination, but turned it down), for assisting the French Resistance during World War II and for being the first American-born woman to receive the French military honor, the Croix de guerre”.

Photo: American entertainer Josephine Baker in costume for her famous “banana dance”. Baker was an overnight sensation when she arrived in Paris in the mid-1920s. (Photo by Walery/Getty Images)

This July 2014 image provided by the Bureau of Land Management shows the interior of the Natural Trap Cave in north-central Wyoming. The cave holds the remains of tens of thousands of animals, including many now-extinct species, from the late Pleistocene period tens of thousands of years ago. Scientists have resumed digging for the first time in more than 30 years. (Photo by AP Photo/Bureau of Land Management)

Lowry Park Zoo elephants Matjeka, 23, and her 1-year-old daughter, Mavi, apply a liberal coating of “sunscreen” to themselves in a clay mud wallow at the park Tuesday, August 12, 2014, in Tampa, Fla., on the park's first observation of World Elephant Day to raise awareness of the wild African elephant crisis. “Elephants are prone to being sunburned”, said associate curator Chris Massaro. “What they need is lot of mud or clay to roll around in and cover up their skin so it will protect it from the sun”. (Photo by Cherie Diez/AP Photo/The Tampa Bay Times)

A visitor takes a photograph from the North Star observation capsule onboard the cruise ship Quantum of the Seas which is currently docked at Southampton on October 31, 2014 in Southampton, England. Billed as the world's first smartship, Royal Caribbean's Quantum of the Seas is claimed to be the most high-tech cruise ship in the world, with high tech modifications such as virtual balconies in windowless rooms and features such as the first dodgem ride on water, and a skydiving simulator. The ship will shortly begin its voyage from Southampton, where it docked earlier this week, to New York before relocating to the Caribbean for the 2014-15 season. (Photo by Matt Cardy/Getty Images)

A Grey Seal pup and it's mother lay in the mud at the Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust's Donna Nook nature reserve on November 24, 2014 in Grimsby, England. Seal pup numbers have increased on last year with over 800 pups born at the reserve so far. Large bull seals are the first to arrive at the reserve in late October or early November where they will wait for females. (Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

Secondary school students perform a barefoot “pilgrimage of suffering” to support the Occupy Central civil disobedience movement at the Admiralty protest site in Hong Kong November 30, 2014. It has been two months since police first fired tear gas to disperse demonstrators from the main protest site in the Admiralty district next to government offices in the heart of the Asian financial centre. (Photo by Bobby Yip/Reuters)

In this undated photo made available by journal Nature on January 15, 2014, a northern bald ibis (Geronticus eremita) flies in Tuscany, Italy. A new study released Wednesday, January 15, 2014 says the birds choreograph the flapping of their wings, getting a boost from an updraft of air in the wake of the flapping wings by flying behind the first bird and off to the side. When a flock of birds take advantage of these aerodynamics, they form a V. (Photo by Markus Unsöld/AP Photo)