5 quotations, each verified against its source and credited to the work it comes from — the wording as Josephine Baker wrote or said it, not as the internet passes it around.
How these quotes were checked
Josephine Baker spoke at the March on Washington on 28 August 1963, in her Free French uniform, the only woman to give a substantial address that day. The speech is where her quotable sentences live, and every line here is checked against its archived transcript.
The phrase most often put in her mouth belongs to a song rather than to her, and it is documented below.
A sentence linked to Hemingway may be exact, shortened, remembered by someone else, or unsupported. Each label below explains what the available evidence actually proves.
This is the title line of “J'ai deux amours,” the 1930 song written for Baker by Géo Koger, Henri Varna and Vincent Scotto, which she made famous and sang for the rest of her life. It is repeatedly quoted as a personal statement she made about France; it is a lyric she performed, written by three other people.
I have walked into the palaces of kings and queens and into the houses of presidents. But I could not walk into a hotel in America and get a cup of coffee, and that made me mad.
When I left St. Louis a long time ago, the conductor directed me to the last car. But when I ran away to another country, I didn't have to do that. I could go into any restaurant I wanted to.
You must get an education. You must go to school, and you must learn to protect yourself with the pen, and not the gun.
When you scream, friends, I know you will be heard. And you will be heard now.
I want you to have a chance at what I had. But I do not want you to have to run away to get it.
Yes. On 28 August 1963 she flew in from France at fifty-seven, wore her Free French uniform, and gave the only substantial address by a woman that day, speaking shortly before Martin Luther King Jr.
From that speech: “I have walked into the palaces of kings and queens and into the houses of presidents. But I could not walk into a hotel in America and get a cup of coffee, and that made me mad.”
That is the title line of “J'ai deux amours,” a 1930 song written for her by Géo Koger, Henri Varna and Vincent Scotto. She sang it for decades, and it is constantly quoted as though she said it about her own life.
Segregation. As she put it in 1963, the conductor in St. Louis directed her to the last car, and in France she could walk into any restaurant she wanted. She moved to Paris in 1925 and took French citizenship in 1937.
“You must get an education. You must go to school, and you must learn to protect yourself with the pen, and not the gun.”
The sources below are the editions, archives, and full-text searches used to verify the quotations on this page. Every line was checked against one or more of them before it appeared here.
Archival evidence used to document the historical record connected to Josephine Baker.
Verification is the point of this collection: a quotation is listed only when its wording has been checked against the sources above, and the attribution notes record what each check found about the famous lines that failed.
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