A gull gives its familiar cry on the roof of a beach bar on the Baltic coast on July 16, 2024. (Photo by Jens Büttner/dpa)

Couples dance samba as smoke rises from a burning pyrotechnics warehouse in Moscow on June 19 2021. (Photo by Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP Photo)

Tea garden workers carry sacks of tea leaves at Fatikchera tea garden estate on the outskirts of Agartala, India, May 10, 2016. (Photo by Jayanta Dey/Reuters)

A young person wearing military special forces gear holds a gun in the army village during Memorial Day weekend celebrations in Miami Beach, Florida, USA, 25 May 2024. The two day Hyundai Air & Sea Show event showcases the men, women, technology and equipment from all five branches of the United States Military as well as police, firefighters and first responder agencies. (Photo by Cristobal Herrera/EPA)

“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)

A new book of photos by legendary photographer Weegee shows what industrialized, pre-gentrified New York looked like in the mid-20th century, before the city was crammed with towers and billboards. Here: this combination shows the 1945 photo “Derelict sleeping on the sidewalk outside police headquarters” by Weegee, provided by the International Center of Photography in New York, and a woman walking on the same spot on Wednesday, March 18, 2015. (Photo by AP Photo/Copyright Weegee/The International Center of Photography, Mark Lennihan)

Two brides kiss during their wedding ceremony to each other at the wedding registry office in St. Petersburg November 7, 2014. The two St. Petersburg women married in the official city ceremony last week, seemingly circumventing Russia's ban on same-s*x marriages. One of the brides was born a man but is undergoing hormone therapy and considers herself a woman. Though her male passport identity ensured the marriage was legal by Russian law, a St. Petersburg lawmaker has vowed to nullify their wedding. (Photo by Reuters/Stringer)