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JOSEPHINE BAKER ON U.S. STAMP: Postal Service issues commemorative series honoring vintage black cinema.
*Beginning today, the US Postal Service (USPS) will feature the late African American entertainer Josephine Baker on a stamp that reproduces a poster from her 1935 French film "Princess Tam-Tam."
The image is part of a commemorative series of US postage stamps honoring vintage black cinema that will be unveiled at a ceremony in Newark, New Jersey on Wednesday.
They serve as "invaluable pieces of history, preserving memories of cultural phenomena that otherwise might have been forgotten," said USPS vice president Delores Killette in a statement Tuesday.
"My adoptive mother, whose theme song was Two loves Have I, my Country and Paris,' would be delighted, thrilled and deeply moved by this wonderful tribute to African-American culture," Baker's adopted son Jean-Claude Baker said in the statement.
After a free-speech battle supported by the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), Jean-Claude Baker was allowed in May 2007 to mail 15,000 postcards to patrons of "Chez Josephine," his New York restaurant opened 22 years ago in honor of his adopted mother.
The USPS had refused to accept and mail the cards, which featured a 1926 watercolor by Henry Fournier depicting Baker as a topless Follies-Bergere dancer, on the basis that they were "pornographic", according to the NYCLU. But the Baker son held firm and eventually prevailed in his case, earning his right to send the cards and an apology from the USPS.
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