PARIS - I was in the City of Lights for less than a day before I found myself listening to stories about a black woman who followed her dreams across the Atlantic rather than allow them to be crushed beneath the weight of American racism.
 
Ricki Stevenson, an Oakland-born journalist who lives here and now directs tours of black Paris, took my travel companions and me to the Theatre Des Champs-Elysees -- the place where Josephine Baker wowed Parisian audiences in Le Revue Negre.

Paris was the place where Baker, with her famed banana dance and other performances, defied an American society bent on defining black people by their otherness. She proved that black sensuality, combined with talent, was the stuff of great entertainment, not freak shows.

It was clear, at least, that the French got it.

Stevenson whipped out photos of Baker in her heyday, strolling down the Champs-Elysees with a leopard on a leash and a crush of admirers on her trail. She talked about how Baker was a fighter and how her obsession with fighting injustice and oppression in the world led her from working with the French resistance during World War II, to becoming one of only two women to speak at the 1963 March on Washington. Stevenson also talked about how, after Baker died from a brain hemorrhage in 1975, the French gave her a state funeral.

More than 100,000 people came to see her off.

I already knew most of that. I knew about Baker’s joys, her strength, her miserable childhood in St. Louis and her torment over never being accepted in the country of her birth.

Yet no matter how much I hear the story of Le Baker, I’m always reminded of the greatness that black people can achieve if they are in an environment in which their talents are respected and nurtured.
And I find myself wishing that more of us could muster the strength to not succumb to environments that tell us that we’re nothing, or find a way to change them.

That’s not happening enough.

I think about how Baker, the daughter of a washerwoman who hired her out as a maid when she was eight and who witnessed black people being slaughtered by whites during the 1917 East St. Louis riots, didn’t allow her environment to define what survival meant for her.

Today, for many younger black people struggling with spiritual and material impoverishment, survival is defined by day-to-day stuff; like selling drugs or accepting incarceration as a part of life. Baker, on the other hand, saw survival as fighting the misery around her by finding a way to follow her dreams.

For her, that meant following her passion for art and dancing -- and then using that passion to forge an escape route from poverty and inequality.
 
And that route led her to Paris -- and to becoming a woman ahead of her time.

Stevenson told us that Baker was perhaps the world’s first mass-marketed celebrity. Dolls were made in her likeness, as well as perfumes, hair pomades, oils and underwear. By the time she was 20, she owned her own nightclub.

By the time she was 21, she was a millionaire.

Baker didn’t escape to a perfect life in Paris. She eventually was bankrupted after her battles to end segregation in the United States caused her to draw the ire of former FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover who, according to Stevenson, made it difficult for her to earn a living after she condemned American racism in the foreign press. Baker was evicted from her chateau, and was rescued by Princess Grace of Monaco, who gave her a villa.

Of course, few of us will become another Josephine Baker. But what’s important to remember about her life, as well as the lives of the scores of black expatriates who settled in Paris, is that they responded to their oppression by following their urge to create, rather than destroy.

It was also that urge that empowered many of them to lend their strengths to the civil rights movement.

So going to Paris turned out to be more of a pilgrimage rather than a vacation for me. And while few of us can -- or, for that matter, need to -- cross an ocean to achieve greatness as the black expatriates did, it still is important for us to create environments that support our dreams.

And not succumb to those that only keep us mired in nightmares.