21. She Got No Love in 1930s America
While European audiences embraced and adored Baker, American ones did not. In 1936, she returned to her homeland to star in the Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway, but it turned into a disaster. A black woman with so much sophistication and power was anathema to American audiences, who roundly rejected her, and to the media, which ran scathing reviews of her. Time magazine, for example, dismissed her as a “Negro wench”. The box office numbers were unimpressive, and Baker ended up getting replaced.