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Paris has always had powerful associations for African-Americans.
It is where Thomas Jefferson lived with his devoted slave Sally Hemings;
where jazz first captivated Europe at the end of World War I.
It is also where generations of black writers and intellectuals came to
enjoy the taste of freedom.
Until recently, it was impossible for visitors to the French capital to
gain more than a fleeting impression of the city's role in the development
of the African-American identity.
But over the last few years a new form of tourism has appeared thanks to
growing demand from the educated black middle class in the US.
Hotels Paris
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Le General Hotel Paris ****
Welcome to Le General hotel, situated in the heart of Paris, at the
crossroads of the business and tourist districts. The hotel offers a bar for
your leisure in one of the spacious lounges, where you can enjoy before
going out for dinner. Le General Hotel Paris is a hotel of classic charm
with a spacious and comfortable lobby with a winter garden, fitness centre
and forty-eight comfortable rooms. |
Several operators are now offering culturally-specific guided tours to
open up the rich heritage of Josephine Baker, Sidney Bechet, James Baldwin,
Richard Wright and the countless others who came to France to escape the
suffocating restrictions of their homeland.
Black history
"African-Americans are constantly aware that we have a legacy which it
will be very hard - perhaps impossible - to shed.
"It's a question of constantly being made to feel you are second best,"
says Monique Wells, of Discover Paris, which offers walking itineraries
around Paris.
"We are constantly trying to validate ourselves. And that is why cultural
tourism to places like Paris is becoming so important."
A typical tour begins at the Arc de Triomphe, which the abolitionist
leader William Wells Brown climbed in 1849 and afterwards said that "you
could look out over a city where you are finally free, even from bounty
hunters and fugitive slave laws".
Below - at Number 92 on the Champs Elysees - lies the former US embassy
where the future president, Thomas Jefferson, started what may or may not
have been a sexual affair with Hemings.
Many African-Americans believe he was the father of her seven children,
though the issue remains hotly debated.
Casino de Paris
In 1917, the Casino de Paris hosted the first ever jazz concert
It was also down the Champs Elysees that the famed Harlem Hellfighters
and other black regiments paraded at the end of World War I - an episode
which was a turning-point in the love affair between black Americans and
France.
More than 250,000 black soldiers came to France after 1917 but they were
looked on with disdain by their white commanders and consigned to menial
tasks behind the lines.
But the French recognised their potential and attached the black troops
to their own army.
The Harlem Hellfighters - the US Army's 369th regiment from New York City
- saw the longest period of action of any American unit and was the first to
reach the river Rhine.
"The French treated them like human-beings, and black Americans never
forgot it," says Ricki Stevenson, of Black Paris Tours.
Artists and intellectuals
Musicians attached to black units, such as Louis Mitchell and James
Europe, introduced Paris to jazz, which has been a passion here ever since.
The first ever jazz concert in the city was in 1917 at the Casino de
Paris.
If few landmarks of the time survive, visitors can still wander the
streets of lower Montmartre and recall the thriving black club scene of the
1920s when characters like Ada "Bricktop" Smith, Adelaide Hall, and, of
course, Josephine Baker surfed the craze known as negrophilie.
Writers followed. Members of the so-called Harlem Renaissance like
Langston Hughes hung out in 1920s Montparnasse, and after World War II a new
generation of African-Americans took advantage of the GI Bill to live out a
bohemian, and unsegregated, Paris existence.
Richard Wright, Chester Himes, and James Baldwin are only the best-known.
"It was a rite of passage for black American intellectuals," says Ricki
Stevenson.
"Paris was a place to come and think, take a broader view of the world,
where - for once - your ideas and talents counted for more than your
colour."
Other spots on the itinerary include the Madeleine church, where the
funeral of Josephine Baker took place in style in 1975; the Grand Hotel on
the Place de l'Opera where W.E.B. Dubois organised the first Pan African
Congress in 1919; and Haynes restaurant in the 9th arrondissement, opened by
an African-American in 1949 and still going strong.
Discover Paris
The unifying theme of the tours is the vision harboured by generations of
black Americans that France was a country where they could more easily be
themselves - free from the obstructions and assumptions that limited their
lives back home.
So much has changed in the last decades, but oddly enough, according to
Monique Wells, something of that sense of affirmation is still felt by black
Americans when they come to Paris as tourists.
"African-Americans are above all... Americans. Even if we have been made
to suffer for it, our culture is an American culture," she says.
"When black people come here they only have to open their mouths to be
immediately classed - not as black, or coloured - but simply American.
"And for many that is a strange and exhilarating experience."
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