"Onstage, the old magical transformation took place. She burst into frenetic action. She seemed to move every part of her body in a different direction at once. She clowned outrageously, unable to stop herself. She crossed her eyes. Her feet tripped over each other while the other girls were kicking neatly in step. The effect of her performance was to mock the very idea of a chorus line, a row of people mechanically repeating the same gestures. The chorus line hated her. They had a simple term for what she was doing: scene stealing. But audiences loved her."
-Phyllis Rose, author of Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in Her Time

"Her movements were all so fast no one had time to decide what was happening. 'Is it a man? Is it a woman?' people wondered. Is she awful or marvelous? Black or white? Is that real hair or has it been painted on? She epitomized ambiguity, new frontiers. She seemed something more fugitive and extravagant than a dancer - more like ectoplasm. She was a revelation of possibilities in human nature they hadn't suspected. The animal inside of every human being wasn't dark, tormented, savage. It was good-natured, lively, sexy rather than sensual, above all funny."
- Phyllis Rose, Jazz Cleopatra

"With racist fantasies on the one hand and colonialist fantasies on the other, it seems fair to say that Baker's impact on Paris in 1925 had as much to do with her color as her talent. She served as a focus for decades of theorizing about race."
- Phyllis Rose, Jazz Cleopatra

"'She would come offstage with the audience screaming and applauding and with her face lighted up with joy,' Noble Sissle recalled. Once she came offstage to find him scowling. 'Did I do the steps right that time?' she asked, and was told she hadn't done them at all. She widened her eyes, put her hand over her mouth, giggled, and promised to do better next time. 'Her emotions were beyond her control,' Sissle said. It wasn't that she wanted to be contrary. But youth, high spirits, and her excellent instincts for getting a laugh were controlling her body."
- Phyllis Rose, Jazz Cleopatra (Noble Sissle was co-creator of Shuffle Along)

"[The 1926 Follies performance] might very easily be called rotten, but can be sat through, even to twelve-thirty, because of the perfect delight one gets from Josephine Baker. She makes all the nudity and glitter of the rest (even the so well-drilled Tiller Girls) curiously insipid by comparison."
- Nancy Cunard, Vogue

"All that remains now is for her to try on the glass slipper and marry the prince."
- A black American who saw the Follies show

"She kissed babies in foundling homes, gave dolls to the young and soup to the aged, presided at the opening of the Tour de France, celebrated holidays, went to fairs, joked with workers and did charity benefits galore. She was all over Paris, always good-natured and exquisitely dressed."
- Phyllis Rose, Jazz Cleopatra

"Her appearances have been marked by perhaps the most outspoken opposition to racial discrimination and segregation ever shown by a Negro artist, except Robeson."
- Philadelphia Inquirer

"Josephine left Paris rich, adored, famous throughout Europe. But in New York, in spite of the publicity that preceded her arrival, she was received as an uppity colored girl."
- Jo Bouillon, Josephine's fourth husband

"She appeared to shed pounds. The line of her back straightened, her upper thighs tensed and lengthened, her stomach flattened, her jowls disappeared. Her eyeglasses were hurriedly exchanged for a rhinestone microphone, her chin lifted, her head went back, and the Josephine of Parisian dreams suddenly appeared as if by magic onstage. A huge and collective sexual sigh seemed to rise from the audience upon her entrance, the smooth siren voice slid out over the audience. I turned to Geoffrey [Holder] in amazement. He just shrugged his shoulders and said, 'I told you she was something else.'"
- An American writer on watching Josephine perform at age 68

"Tall, coffee skin, ebony eyes, legs of paradise, a smile to end all smiles."
- Pablo Picasso

"Her magnificent dark body, a new model to the French, proved for the first time that black was beautiful."
- Janet Flanner, New Yorker correspondent

"For a weary, disillusioned, post-World War I era, she epitomized a new freedom festivity."
- Donald Bogle, Essence

"If an orchid could sizzle, it would be something like Josephine Baker."
- Excerpt from a review in The Los Angeles Examiner

"She is the Nefertiti of now."
- Pablo Picasso, comparing Josephine Baker to a glamorous queen of Egypt

"The most sensational woman anybody ever saw, or ever will."
- Ernest Hemingway

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