The U.S. Postal Service released a series of stamps to commemorate honoring vintage black cinema yesterday at a ceremony in Newark, New Jersey. One of the stamps is of the legendary actress Josephine Baker. The US Postal Service, which last year lost a legal battle after refusing to mail postcards with a topless image of US-born chanteuse Josephine Baker, is honoring the late black american with a stamp of her own on Wednesday.
The stamp reproduces a poster from the 1935 French film "Princess Tam-Tam" that featured the sultry star -- this time with her bosom covered -- who emigrated to France where she took much of Europe by storm after encountering racism in her home country.
Josephine Baker was born in 1906 in St. Louis, Missouri, where she came face to face with discrimination, including in theaters where blacks were barred from sitting in the same areas as whites. After achieving fame in Europe she often returned to the United States to help with the civil rights movement, and joined the Reverend Martin Luther King at the landmark 1963 march on Washington.
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