---

Black Americans in France is an ongoing series highlighting African Americans living abroad during the 2024 Paris Games.

---

PARIS — Leroy Chalk was born in Big Sandy, Texas, and moved to France in 1977.

Unlike many Black expatriates, Chalk did not set his eyes on Paris at an early age and did not leave the United States because he was fed up with racism. His dream was to play basketball, and he would go wherever the game took him: from Big Sandy to Lincoln, Nebraska, to Boston to Belgium and finally Paris.

What began as a basketball journey became an adventure that landed him in the City of Light.

“I’ve always been adventurous,” he told me recently. “I was back there in the country. I never liked that country life. Now I could really enjoy it, but when I was a kid coming up, I didn’t want to be in the country. I wanted to go to New York. I always wanted to be in a city environment-type thing. Not in the country.”

Chalk’s ticket out of Big Sandy became basketball.

Chalk originally signed a letter of intent to attend East Texas State. He was resigned to staying local. “Everybody could have come to see me play, though that wasn’t big-time ball,” Chalk said.

After an outstanding senior year in high school, he caught the attention of a number of larger schools, including the University of Nebraska. The Cornhuskers came calling to Big Sandy and convinced Chalk to visit Lincoln.

Chalk’s world was about to widen.

“I had just turned 18, I hadn’t ever been nowhere,” he said.

As one of five children — and the only boy — the idea of going to Nebraska was daunting.

“Me and my mother were very, very tight. You know what I mean? Me and her took care of the girls,” Chalk said. “For me to leave at 18, that was hard to do, that was a hard decision to make. When I made it, I said, ‘I got to make it, I can’t go up there and fail and make my mama ’shamed.’ I had to make it for my mom’s sake.”

Chalk did indeed do well at Nebraska, well enough to be drafted by the Boston Celtics and come within an injury of making the team. He was chosen in the 13th round of the 1971 NBA draft.

Clarence Glover was a first-round pick that year but Chalk was having a great camp … at Glover’s expense. “I was eating him up, I was hungry,” he said. “Anything coming off the board I’m going for it. I’m young and crazy.”

Unfortunately, Chalk injured his knee and was released. 

“Red Auerbach took me to the airport in his car,” Chalk recalled. “He had a white Cadillac. I’ll never forget that day. He said, ‘Chalk I want you to come back next year, you got a lot of potential.’ ”

​Being cut by Boston was the first major setback of Chalk’s career and it stung. “I cried,” he said. “That hurt, man that hurt. I’d been thinking about that for so long and then to get hurt and everything like that, that was so disappointing.”

Chalk’s agent told him that the Celtics wanted to bring him back but that he should go play in Europe to get healthy. “I was supposed to go for two years and go back. But I got hurt,” Chalk said. “That’s why I had to stay over here. I couldn’t go back to the NBA hurt. I went to Europe to get healthy. Instead, I got hurt worse.”

His first stop was Belgium. Despite the injury, Chalk played well enough to be regarded as an upper-echelon player with all of the attendant perks. He saw the advantages of being a Black American star playing abroad.

“When I got started over here, I was like the star of the team, and that makes a difference,” he said. “When you’re a star, I don’t care what color you are, you get priority treatment.”

There were clubs in Belgium that would not admit certain Black people. “I could go up in there, they’d say, ‘Oh, that’s Leroy, come on in, man,’ ” he said.

“I had a Moroccan guy with me, they told me, ‘You’re good, but no North Africans in here.’ ”

His friend eventually was allowed entry because of Chalk.

“Even though you don’t realize it at the time, it makes a big difference when you’re welcomed and accepted wide open in a place just because who you are, what you’ve done,” Chalk said. “Personally, I was really well treated.”

Chalk played for four years in Belgium. He began playing in France in 1977, playing a year in Châlons-en-Champagne, then a year in Dijon.

When Chalk arrived in France, he didn’t think he’d stay for five decades. He played until the mid-1990s, and in the interim he and his Guadeloupean partner had a daughter. Chalk earned his degree from the National Institute of Sport, Expertise, and Performance. He began teaching and coaching at the Marymount International School in Paris as an after-school sports coach.

“By me having my degree, a French degree, I got into the school system right away,” he said.

​Chalk was settling into life as a Black American in Paris, though he didn’t necessarily connect with the Black community.

“Everything in Paris is so mixed up, it ain’t really no area you can go and say you’re going to the Black part of town or the white part,” Chalk said.

His daughter, who was born in 1987, reflects a different kind of racial sensibility than Chalk’s which was formed by a segregated upbringing in Big Sandy.

“She was raised here in France, so she doesn’t have the same attitude as Black people like me,” he said. “Her attitude is that she doesn’t care who’s in her group: Chinese, Black, white. It doesn’t really matter to her.

“We’re raised up with that Black-White thing, but my daughter being raised up over here, she doesn’t care. Her attitude is totally different than mine.”

Chalk is a different kind of Black American expat. He did not target France, he landed here because of basketball. At age 75, he has enjoyed a good life in Paris. He is a French resident but an American citizen. “I have all the rights as a French person here, but not voting rights,” he said.

During the course of interviewing a handful of African Americans living in Paris, I asked them all the same questions. 

• Could they see themselves moving back to the United States?
• Do they feel freer in France than in the United States?
• Do they miss the States?
• Do they feel French?

“Man, I really would like to go back, this coming fall as a matter of fact,” Chalk said. “But permanently? I don’t see it. I’d have to hit the lotto. I’d have to have some backup because for me just to go back with my wages, I couldn’t make it.”

Freer?: “I do,” he said. “I don’t feel discrimination like there is in the States. It exists, of course. But I don’t feel the discrimination like it is in the States.”

Do you miss the United States? “Not really. I go back and enjoy myself but I’ve been over here so long, so not really,” he said.

​Finally, do you feel French?

​“I’ve been up here 53 years, and I don’t feel French,” Chalk said. “I’m more French than most of these people walking around here, but I do not feel French at all.

“I feel comfortable, but I don’t feel French.”

---

Black Americans in France is an ongoing series highlighting African Americans living abroad during the 2024 Paris Games.

---

PARIS — “There are three types of Black folk living in Paris,” novelist Jake Lamar told me recently when we met at a cafe near his home in Montmartre.

Lamar, 63, became part of a long rich literary tradition of African American writers in Paris when he moved here in 1993. He settled in the Montmartre district, one of the earliest Black American enclaves in Paris. The French capital has been a magnet for African Americans since the turn of the 20th century. How they have adapted to life in the City of Light has varied.

“There’s one type of American who wants Paris to be just like home and they only hang out with other Americans. They only speak English. They complain about the French all the time, but they like it here. But it’s like mentally, they’ve never left the states,” Lamar said.

The second type of Black expat “just disappears into France,” Lamar said. “They married a French person and just disappeared into France. They didn’t want to hang out with Americans, Black or white. They only spoke French. They often had French kids they spoke to. They worked in a French environment. They just rejected ties to America.”

Lamar counts himself among the third type: the betwixt and between Black expat. “We love being here and will integrate to a certain point, learn the language make a living. But we also remain very strongly tied to America and love hanging out with other Americans because Americans in general are easier to deal with here than in America, Black Americans who made a kind of unusual choice. A lot of us didn’t quite fit in in America. But we weren’t ready to totally reject America and become French — we liked the dual consciousness.”

Despite living in Paris for three decades, Lamar has resisted certain aspects of French culture, just as there are elements of United States culture he will never forsake.

“I’m never going to be a big soccer fan, that’s not going to happen,” he said. “I’ll watch the World Cup and the Euro [European Championships], but I’m just not going to sit down and watch any PSG [Paris Saint-Germain] match. But I’ll watch any NBA game or any NFL game.”

Earlier this month Lamar won the prestigious Dagger Award for crime fiction in the historical novel category for his latest novel “Viper’s Dream.” The award put Lamar in the tradition of Richard Wright and James Baldwin but even more squarely in the tradition of Chester Himes, whose Harlem based detective novels were first published to great acclaim in France.

More significantly, the award, the recognition and Lamar’s consistent outpouring of work puts him in the larger literary tradition of Black American writers who have sought refuge and escape in Paris for more than 100 years.

Lamar was born in the Bronx, New York, and attended Harvard where he majored in history and literature. His first job out of college was with TIME magazine, though when I asked how he made transition from journalist to novelist, Lamar said that being a journalist was never a goal nor an aspiration.

He knew about Black literary tradition in Paris and wanted to become part of it. Lamar wanted to be a writer; specifically, he wanted to be an African American writer living in Paris.

“I started out wanting to be a novelist,” he said. “From the time I read Baldwin and Wright and [Ralph] Ellison and all these great writers when I was in high school, I wanted to be a fiction writer.”

When he was 13 years old, Lamar said that four works changed the course of his life: “The Bluest Eyes,” Toni Morrison’s debut novel; “A Raisin in the Sun,” the iconic play by Lorraine Hansberry; “Black Boy,” Wright’s memoir about growing up in Mississippi; and “Go Tell it On The Mountain,” Baldwin’s autobiographical first novel.

“I was so moved by this book, and I asked my teacher, ‘Who is James Baldwin?’ and he said he was American living in Paris. That seemed like an exotic idea,” Lamar said. “It must have been a little while later that I read “Black Boy,” and I found out that Richard Wright lived in Paris. That was starting to seem like a pattern.”

When he worked at TIME, Lamar hired an agent who suggested that for his first book project Lamar consider writing a memoir although he was only 28 years old at the time. The memoir became “Bourgeois Blues.” Although the memoir was about the strained relationship between Lamar and his father, the book exams the evolution of racial politics in the United States.

He began the book when he was 28, the memoir was published two years later in 1991. When he won the prestigious Lyndhurst Prize the same year, Lamar quit TIME and began laying the foundation to move to Paris. He used the first check to get out of debt, the second check to pay off his college loans. He made the final payment in 1993; the next day he was on a plane to Paris.

“It was always Paris,” Lamar said. “I didn’t want to go to London. I didn’t want to go to Spain. It was Paris and that literary tradition.”

The idea was to stay for a year, “That seemed reasonable. I thought I would have to go back to the States it was gonna be like my last wild adventure before I settled into a teaching job somewhere and then be became a respectable grown up. I’m just going to have this adventure for a year while I work on this novel, because I had the contract for the second book.”

The longer Lamar stayed in Paris, the longer he wanted to stay. He met older writers like Ted Joans and James Emanuel who showed him how to thrive and introduced him to the Black literary community.

“They were links to this history that I that I loved,” he said. “What I learned from men like Ted Joans and James Emanuel was that you could live improvisationally that if you were willing to risk it, you didn’t have to live a standard paycheck to paycheck salaried life. You could dare to deliver improvisationally that was what took courage. But the thing is I loved it so much and was meeting such great people and that was the inspiration to stay.”

Lamar was actually in line back in the United States for a job at Carnegie Mellon teaching creative writing. “And then I met the woman I was going to marry. She was European. she’s an actress and singer and there was nothing for her in America. I was loving it here and I thought ‘OK I’m just going to try it I’m just going to keep winging it. We’re still together so it worked out,’ ” Lamar said.

His decision to move to Paris was rooted in following a literary tradition. The move was not a protest vote against the United States, though there was much to protest against.

“I did not come here to protest,” he said. “But that said, right before I won this grant in 1992 was the verdict in the Rodney King police brutality and the whole uprising in L.A. Then I got this grant and a year later I was gone. I never said to myself, ‘Oh, because of what happened in L.A. I want to get out.’ I wanted to see how things work somewhere else, you know? There was that curiosity. I didn’t find my life in America intolerable, but I was curious.”

Four months after arriving in Paris, Lamar and another Black friend were stopped by Paris police as they were walking back from a gathering through an upscale French neighborhood. Lamar was calm, though his friend lost his cool and fought back.

That was something Lamar knew he could have never survived in the United States.

“That could have happened in America,” he said. “The only differences are that in America, this guy would have probably been shot once he stared fighting the police. They would have shot him and then killed me as a witness.

“It made me realize that whatever anybody will tell you France is not a racial paradise, and I was very happy to get that lesson after four months here rather than going four years thinking, “Hey, everything’s wonderful, everything’s great.”

While there is no earthly paradise for Black Americans, Lamar feels a certain weight has been lifted off his shoulders here. It’s a weight he never knew existed until he left.

“I’ve never felt the kind of daily grind of racism and some attitudes that you get in America,” he said. “I don’t go back much anymore, but I would go back and just go ask for help at the information desk, and there’ll be a white person talking to me in a sneering tone, and I wasn’t used to it anymore. I’m used to being calling Monsieur and being treated with respect. And I go into a shop and the security guards follows me around. I feel it right away. It’s like, ‘Oh, God, I forgot about and this.’ The longer I stayed over here, the more difficult it was for me. If you live in America, you don’t realize, like a fish doesn’t know it’s swimming in water until you throw him out of it.

“I just thought, ‘This is the way it is,’ and then you go someplace else and people are just different. I mean, certainly French people aren’t always nice, but you don’t get that immediate feeling of distrust or suspicion or condescension.’’

As with other Black Americans expats, I wondered how Lamar saw himself. He said his identity was similar to how he saw himself in the United States.

“Someone pointed out to me years ago that when people ask me where I’m from, I don’t say America, I say New York. It’s the same with Paris,’’ Lamar said. “I’ve traveled all over France, but I’ve lived in this one arrondissement for almost half my life. I know my way around Paris. I know the customs in Paris. I care about what happens in the city passionately.

“I don’t feel French, but I do feel Parisian.’’

---

Black Americans in France is an ongoing series highlighting African Americans living abroad during the 2024 Paris Games.

---

“I actually came here to explore. When I was in college my professor said, ‘The world is your oyster.’ So, I took that and ran with it.” – Shirley Dauger

When Shirley Dauger decided to move from Long Island, New York, to Paris, she made it clear that she was not making a protest move. She was making a move for adventure.

“I didn’t leave, I went to explore,” Dauger said from her home in Paris. “I’m not trying to run away because I’m feeling persecuted. I wanted to know the world.”

As the daughter of parents who immigrated to the United States from Haiti, Dauger appreciated that it was possible to leave your country and love your country.

“They left their country for a better life, but they loved their country,” she said, “They always loved their country, but they knew they had to leave to have a better life, but in no way did they ever talk badly or poorly about their life in Haiti. They wanted more economic opportunities so they came to America. But my parents were very Haitian. They talked about Haiti always in a wonderful light.”

In the 30 years that she has lived in France, Dauger’s life has taken a number of intriguing twists and turns. She has invented and reinvented herself, from being a career nurse, to a singer and finally establishing her own private transportation company, My Pearls of Paris.

“I was free to explore. That’s what being in Europe, or another country allows you to do,” Dauger said. “It frees you from all those stereotypical limitations that sometimes people place on you coming from where you we’re born. You come here and all of a sudden you have access to things you never had before.”

Born in Brooklyn, and raised in Baldwin, Long Island, Dauger took her first trip to Paris with a friend in 1990, a year after graduating from Molloy University with a bachelor’s degree in nursing.

As recent employees of Winthrop University Hospital, the two friends had money. “We were always talking about traveling and wanting to see the world,” she said. “So, we flew into England, then France, then Germany, then to Italy. In Italy, we worked in Venice, Rome, and Florence.”

She loved Paris so much she returned six months after the first trip.

“We came back six months later to France because we loved it so much,” Dauger said. “You know how on tours you don’t get to really see a lot, you get a little taste. But we wanted to come and really get to know the city. So, we came back for 10 days. We loved Paris. Because Paris — especially for us, for Haitians — Paris meant more to us because of the link with Haiti, because Haiti was a French colony.’’

When Dauger returned to Paris in 1991, it was basically to pursue a love interest who she had met during her first trip to Paris. They began dating.

The romantic relationship took her back to Paris several times between 1990 and 1991. During her visits, Dugar became fascinated with the international scene and with meeting so many African Americans who had relocated to France.

“This is new for me. I didn’t know any ex-pats,” she said. “I knew of people leaving countries coming to the United States, but I had never met anybody who left the United States to go abroad. Now I’m meeting them. Some were working for corporations, some moved for a change of scenery. I’m meeting writers, I’m meeting people who moved for different reasons. I thought it was fascinating. I was like, ‘Wow, why didn’t anybody tell me that the international theme was really interesting?’ Had I known, instead of becoming a nurse I may have worked for the UN.”

​Dugar decided that she wanted to relocate and that her nursing degree might be her ticket of passage. “I said to myself, ‘Wait a minute, I’m a nurse. Could my nursing degree work here?’ she said. “I started looking into that. I thought, ‘doesn’t a French heart work like an American heart?’ ”

Dauger made it happen. In 1992, she enrolled in the IFSI nursing school in Versailles. She lived with her French boyfriend and embraced the adventure.

“I’m living in France now, and this is cool,” she said. “From October of 1992 to June of 1993, I am living in Versailles, but in the Paris region. So, I’m living life. I’m traveling, seeing different parts, and getting to master the French, master the culture, master asking for things, buying food. I’m literally living as a French person and going to school.”

While she was in the French nursing school, Dauger did a one-week rotation at the American hospital in France. She knew that’s where she wanted to work. She applied for a position after she earned her degree and passed her boards.

Having a degree was one thing, securing a work permit was something else entirely, especially at a time when jobs were scarce. With no job immediately available, Dauger returned to Long Island and her job at Winthrop Hospital in 1993. To her disappointment, Dauger learned that she did not get the position at the American hospital. Her work permit was denied.

There was one more alternative, and she took it: “In France, there’s not many ways to get work permit, but one of the major ways of getting work permit is to marry.”

​In 1994, at a ceremony in Versailles, Dugar and her French boyfriend were married. She began working in the Coronary Care Unit of the American hospital a year later on Feb. 20, 1995.

Six years later, Dauger and her husband divorced, and a new chapter of her life began: She was on her own for the first time in her life, a single Black American woman in Paris.

“I finally got my very, first apartment because I left home and went to live with him,” she said referring to her former husband. “So, I never lived by myself.”

​She began to broaden her horizons beyond nursing. She took voice lessons, began to sing with choirs, ensembles, bands. Singing became a hobby that she took seriously even as she continued to work at the hospital.

“I start singing, and I’m with other people sharing the love of music. I am living the life,” Dauger said. “I started up with an opera company, I’m singing opera, I’m singing Negro spirituals, gospel. I’m singing arias. I’m singing in Italian. I’m singing in German. I’m singing in all these different languages. I’m doing jazz and I’m enjoying the heck out of myself.”

She became known in certain circles, not as a nurse, but as a U.S.-born singer. That was a special designation, one with historic roots attached to Black American entertainers who had come to Paris for centuries. “All of a sudden you become an ambassador, the fact that you are an American, you become this ambassador, and people are asking you questions left and right, about the United States.

“They’re asking me, ‘Where did you come from? Why did you leave? Where did you used to live? Did you use to live in a hot neighborhood?’ ”

Dauger began to explore the rich history of African Americans who came to Paris, often alone, often to escape white racism. While this was not her reason for relocating, she embraced the adventurous spirit of those Black ex-pats. She became inspired by Josephine Baker, who came to Paris at age 19 and became one of the greatest entertainers of her era.

“When you think of it, Josephine Baker came here by herself, she was often the only Black person. She had a purpose in life,” Dauger said. “At the time I came here, I was looking for my purpose in life. I’m a nurse, yes, but is nursing the only thing that defines you? I don’t want to be just defined by one thing. I think we have lots of talent, and I wanted to explore. I was free to explore that.”

When a friend created a new band with two other musicians, she recruited Dauger to be the band’s singer. The band formed two years later. “And that’s how I met my second husband,” she said. Her soon-to-be-husband was the band’s bass player.

The relationship evolved quickly. They began dating, moved in together and in 2009 they were married. In 2010, Dauger had the couple’s son.

It was at this point that fate threw a curve ball. Shortly after the birth of her son doctors discovered that Dauger had a tumor in her leg. She had an operation and was on the road to recovery. “Everything is fine. I get back on my feet, and this whole time I’m on maternity leave,” she said.

“Then I feel a lump in my right breast.” She was diagnosed with Stage 3 breast cancer. Her son was 10 months old at the time of her diagnosis. “I go from maternity leave to sick leave,” she said.

Through rounds of chemotherapy and radiation therapy, Dauger chose to see the glass as half full. “And so, during that whole time, it allowed me to be home. If you want to see the bright side of a fearful moment, I was able to be home with him, see him grow, and still be able to have my salary,” she said.

Dugar was too weak to go back to full-time nursing, though she was able to secure a desk job working in quality assurance. The job was part-time and that meant part-time money. She needed to supplement her income.

“And so, my husband says, ‘Well, have you ever thought of doing a little bit of Uber?’ ” Dauger said. “I’ve always loved to drive. If I go out with friends, I’ll be the one dropping my friends off at their home at night. And my husband’s like, ‘Well, why don’t you get paid for it?’ “

By mid-2017, Dugar began driving Uber on a part-time basis. She loved the job. “I’m driving and I’m loving it. I’m talking to people. I’m meeting people from all over the world. My English comes in real handy, because a lot of English-speaking people don’t know French well enough to converse. And a lot of French drivers can’t speak well enough to converse, either, in English. And since I’m a nurse, I know how to take care of people. I know how to help people. I know how to assist people. I know how to listen to people.”

Through word-of-mouth, passengers began asking if Dauger drove privately. Could they call on her directly?

“Little by little, I was noticing a need for an English-speaking driver. And at the same time, people wanted to ask me questions like, ‘Shirley, where do I go? Where’s the best place to eat?’ Or they would comment, ‘What neighborhoods should I go to?’ And people want to know where the Black neighborhoods were,” she said. “And so Chinese people want to know where the Chinatown is. Mexicans want to know where the Mexicans were. Everybody wants to know where their people are. And little by little, I was able to show them and let them know where the hoods were.”

Driving also gave her time to take care of her special-needs son. She determined that she did not want to go back to the hospital.

“I said to myself, I don’t want to be stuck in a hospital,” she said. “If I went back to nursing, [I’m] stuck for 12 hours. I need to have that flexibility. Driving would be one of the best ways to give you that flexibility. I love driving. Driving is my blood.”

A good friend, Ricky Stevenson, owner of Black Paris Tours, helped by giving Dauger referrals.

“She would often call me to handle a couple of her clients,” Dauger said. “And then little by little, she said, ‘Hey Shirley, I think it would be a great idea if I have your information and people could call on you directly.’

“And that’s where I started getting the idea of maybe there’s a real need for English-speaking drivers, but then they’re also Black American drivers. People feel very comfortable. They feel at-ease. Little by little, I said, I think there’s a real need here and I think this could really turn into something.”

She has grown the business over the last four years, building a robust private clientele. At age 57, with a son a husband and her business, Dauger is comfortable with the life she’s living.

The adventure that drew her to Paris 30 years ago has mellowed into a way of life.

“I came to France because I wanted to smell the roses. I wanted to know what it felt like to live and not to survive,” she said. “Coming to France, I learned how to slow down. So I come here and I’m learning to literally take my time. In the United States, you’re always going a mile a minute. You got this, you got that. You got the to-do list. You are hustling from morning to night. And people look at you. If you’re not doing a hundred million things, they’re looking at you like, ‘Oh, you’re not productive.’

“Whereas in France if you do three things, ‘Oh, you’re highly productive.’ So that’s why French culture is known for the art of living. When clients come from the United States, they have a whole list, ‘Oh, we want to do this, we want to do that.’ And I look at them and I say, ‘But when are you going to have that experience? When are you going to enjoy the French experience of being here?’ “

As she grows her business, Dauger continues to sing. She is a member of a choir and part of an opera company. “We’re putting on plays, in Paris. Little theaters, little venues, but we’re doing it,” she said.

“For me, being here is understanding that there is another way of living. We don’t have to be like a chicken running around without its head. People ask me, ‘What are you doing here?’ And my answer all the time is, ‘I’m living the life. I’m living the life.’”

---

Black Americans in France is an ongoing series highlighting African Americans living abroad during the 2024 Paris Games.

---

Julia Browne has been guiding travelers through the history of Black Paris since 1994.

As the owner and founder of Walking the Spirit walking tours, Browne is part of a bustling enterprise that explores the deep, rich history of African Americans in Paris. For many Black Americans, Paris represented liberation and an escape from the steady drone of racism.

For a number of reasons, this was not Browne’s reality.

“To be honest, it was somewhere different, and I liked being somewhere different,” Browne said during a recent interview from her home in Paris. “I liked being in a new culture, I liked looking around and not knowing what types of things were going on and having the opportunity to learn what other people were doing. What life was about.

“I wasn’t looking for freedom. It was a life that was more satisfying and felt closer to my personality.”

Browne’s journey was as compelling as the history her tours reveal. She became part of the Black expat community in February 1990 when she left Canada and moved to the city that had resonated in her soul since she was 10 years old.

Browne was born in Yorkshire, England, after her parents had emigrated from the island of St. Kitts in the 1950s. They were part of the Windrush generation, which was composed of citizens of the Commonwealth countries, especially Caribbean individuals and families, who were invited to the UK to help rebuild Britain after World War II. When Browne was 8, the family, looking for a more promising future, moved to Ontario, Canada. Her father left first and worked in a logging camp. The rest of the family followed and settled in a small German hamlet called Kitchener-Waterloo.

Browne said she became intrigued with France, French people, and French culture in elementary school. She studied French and had a French pen pal in 10th grade. She’s not sure how or why her interests developed.

Her spirit was drawn to France in general, Paris in particular.

“There are some things that come into your mind and you just follow it,” she said.

When Browne was 17, she discovered that her birth father, who was born in the West Indies, was of French origin. Later she discovered that her birth father had roots in Normandy.

Browne made her first trip to Paris in the late 1970s when she was a flight attendant for Air Canada. Her introduction to France was underwhelming.

“I was disappointed because I didn’t like it, I didn’t like it at all,” she said. “I didn’t like the attitude of the people, it just didn’t sit with me very well. It comes like that when you don’t really know what kind of culture you’re stepping into and it is so different from yours.”

When Air Canada laid off hundreds of workers, Browne used the work action payment to enroll in a study abroad program at the University of Toronto. She chose to live in Aix-en-Provence, a city in southern France just north of Marseilles.

It was there that Browne met the Frenchman who would become her husband. They returned to Montreal and got married. After living in Canada for two years, Browne and her husband moved to Paris in 1990. They arrived on Feb 1, the birthday of poet and novelist Langston Hughes.

Browne did not have a grand plan. She certainly had no plans to establish a business based on exploring the rich history of African Americans in France.

That came much later.

“The turning point came very gradually. It crept up on me,” she said. “It’s not something I ever thought I’d be doing. If you would have told me this is the work I would be doing, I would have thought, ‘but that doesn’t even exist,’ because it didn’t exist.’’

After a couple years in Paris, Browne began to meet some Black American expats. She met writer Davida Kilgore who, like Browne, was studying at the Sorbonne. They became friends and Kilgore introduced Browne to other Black Americans.

“It took a conscious effort to go out and meet Black Americans,” she said. “I was an oddball because I was Canadian. My experiences felt different than the Americans.”

On the other hand, Browne was familiar with Black American culture, largely because of television.

“We knew what life was like for African Americans. We knew some of the trials and tribulations. We could name all the big cities, we watched all the same TV shows,” she said. “I had a sense that I knew what it was like to be African American, but I still had a distance from it because I didn’t live it quite like that, so it was two different cultures.”

She knew enough about Black American history to know that the differences were significant.

“We in Canada felt that we were safer,” she said. “We didn’t feel like there was all that prejudice and discrimination, but we knew deep down that it was there. It wasn’t to the same level, wasn’t as in your face as much. It didn’t seem like it.”

For Browne, the opportunity to meet and speak with Black Americans in Paris allowed her to see herself in a broader context: She was Canadian, born in Britain, but still Black. Their stories were part of hers.

“It was a chance for me to hear what it was really like aside from what you had seen in the media. I wanted to know what it was really like to be a Black American as opposed to being a Canadian. That still is kind of ongoing,” she said.

Today, she believes that the common bond between Black Canadians and Black Americans is that they are all North Americans.

“But at the time I felt that there was a dividing line between us,” she said.

The seeds of Browne’s Black Americans in Paris tourism business were planted while she was a taking classes at the Sorbonne. One of her professors, Michel Fabre, who co-founded the Center for Afro-American Studies, had written a book titled A Street Guide to African Americans of Paris.

Browne took the book and walked with it through the streets of Paris. She discovered, for example, that Hughes had lived close to her apartment in the 17th district.

There were so many other gems that she had never known about. “I love research, I love documentaries, I like learning,” Browne said. “I took the book and started walking around with it.

“It was so astonishing to me that I kept doing this walking around places.”

By this time Browne had become part of a group of Black American women called Sisters. During the group’s monthly meetings, Browne began talking about her tours and about the history she had explored.

“I was telling my sisters what I was finding out and someone asked, ‘Could you show us some of these things?’ So, I wrote down somethings on cards and I took some of my friends out.”

Word of her informal tours spread and when friends and relatives visited they asked Browne to be their guide. “That’s literally how it started, I just started showing people because somebody had heard, and somebody told somebody.”

In 1994, an editor from Essence magazine visited Paris. Browne took her around and she wrote a story about the tour. Later, a reporter from the Wall Street Journal wrote about Browne’s Black Paris tour. “It snowballed. It surprised me, but it was so much fun,” she said. “You feel the need and you just step into it.”

As popular as the business has become, Browne remembers that at the outset, travel agencies she contacted did not believe a Black Paris tour was something their customers would want to pursue.

“I would contact travel agents and ask them in the States, ‘Do you think your clients would be interested in this?’ And they said, ‘No, I don’t think so. I can’t see why,’ ” Browne said.

“It was the travelers who went back to their travel agent and said, ‘We want to do this,’ Browne said. “People in general felt a need and they needed somebody to get it done for them. And that’s when the travel industry — well, certain agencies anyway — saw that there was a demand for it. And that’s when it really started.”

Unlike some expats who live in Paris year-round, Browne continues to travel between Paris and Canada. She has trained staff to execute the tours when she is out of the country.

“I was doing the administrative and all that, and I had guides leading the tours. And it was interesting because I got to pass that training and knowledge on to other people I knew among the Black Americans,” Browne said. “It wasn’t just mine anymore, it was other people kicking the can down the road a bit. That was good too. It wasn’t a bad thing in that way.”

When she first moved to Paris, Browne inhaled the culture and loved it.

“In those first years and the fact that I was here full time all the time — bringing up my children, living the life as a wife and part of a French-based family, having friends, teaching, working — I became more and more identified with where I was living. It made me feel good to be part of this society. I liked being French. That’s what I identified with more than being Canadian.

“I feel like I’m more of myself here. I feel like I obviously found a mission and the reason for being here in a way that I don’t feel when I’m back in North America.”

On the other hand, Browne said she also embraces her Canadian roots, and more than anything, enjoys being able to go back and forth. “It allows me to relax into one. And then when I get sick of that, I can relax into the other one,” Browne said. “I just can’t imagine just being one.”

As comforting as Paris has been for generations, Browne, like others, takes pains to point out that Paris is not paradise for Black Americans.

“I don’t think it’s a panacea. Nothing is a panacea. But there are times when you need a break and there are places where you can get a break, where you don’t have to be thinking, you don’t have to feel oppressed, where you can hide,” she said.

“You start to calm down, you start to relax. And then you find other parts of you that you can bring out, just like the writers did. They found a certain space where they could create. And then you get a breath, and then you throw yourself back into the fight if you need be or find where you’re going to fight or what you’re going to fight about. You choose it, but at least you’ve had a chance to sit out a couple of rounds, right?”

---

Black Americans in France is an ongoing series highlighting African Americans living abroad during the 2024 Paris Games.

---

USA Basketball star forward Anthony Davis had a long conversation with his old New Orleans Pelicans teammate Tim Frazier recently at a wedding in Memphis, Tennessee. The talk had nothing to do with basketball or New Orleans. Rather, the subject was Paris as Davis will soon be there with his family for the 2024 Olympics just months after Frazier played professionally there.

“He and his wife were asking, ‘Hey, what should we do when we get out there?’ ” Frazier said during a recent phone interview with Andscape. “And I said, ‘Hey, man, it’s going to be crazy-packed. But if you can, obviously you see the main stuff. See the Louvre. See the Eiffel Tower and experience that with the kids. And there are so many great restaurants out there to choose, so when you get out there, just let me know.’

“We all know what to do when we go to Paris, for the most part. But I gave them a couple of restaurants. But I think obviously you hit the most touristy spots … He knew I was out there in Paris. And I said, ‘Man, just try to experience as much as you can.’ Paris was already busy when I was living there. So, I know it was going to be busy during the Olympics.”

Frazier averaged 4.9 points and 2.3 rebounds while playing in 289 games as a journeyman guard in the NBA over eight seasons. The Houston native suited up for the Pelicans, Philadelphia 76ers, Portland Trail Blazers, Washington Wizards, Milwaukee Bucks, Detroit Pistons, Memphis Grizzlies, Orlando Magic and Cleveland Cavaliers. The 2015 NBA G League MVP last played in the NBA during the 2021-22 season.

In search of more playing time and adventure, Frazier began playing in Europe during the 2022-23 season in Greece for AEK Athens. His next two stops in Europe were in France with SIG Strasbourg and Greece with Prometheus Patras. And on Jan. 29, Frazier returned to action after being sidelined with a foot injury. He signed with Paris Metropolitans 92, the former team of San Antonio Spurs star center Victor Wembanyama. The only other time Frazier had been to Paris was when he played in a European tour in college for Penn State.

“It’s been great. I’ve embraced the experience of going overseas,” Frazier said. “Obviously, it’s nothing like the NBA. But France is, as far as living in Strasbourg and living in Paris, that was some of the best you can get in France outside of living in the South of France, Monaco, Nice and places like that. But I’ve had a great experience where I saw two different things. Strasbourg is very slow-paced because it’s on the border of Germany. And Paris is just fast-paced.

“The traffic is bad in Paris. There are so many people there. It is a tourist town as well. But it’s the closest thing you can get to the States as far as shopping goes and meals. There is Americanized food as well.”

The Metropolitans 92 made it to the 2023 French Pro Finals after a 23-11 regular-season record with Wembanyama and now-Washington Wizards guard Bilal Coulibaly. The Metropolitans 92, however, had a 3-18 record in the French Pro A league when they signed Frazier. While the record was poor, the hope was that Frazier could help the franchise stave off relegation to the second division.

In 13 games for Metropolitans 92, Frazier averaged 11.1 points and 6.1 assists in 28.3 minutes. The Metropolitans 92 finished the regular season with a league-worst 4-30 record and were relegated to the second division.

“I was coming off of injury and at the time I wanted to get out there and play,” Frazier, 33, said. “There were a couple teams that had reached out. Paris was one of them and I jumped on the opportunity to stay, to live in Paris. Obviously, I knew about the team because I had played in Strasbourg last year. I knew Wembanyama was on the team. I know how well they did last [season].

“They weren’t doing as well this [season]. But I jumped on the opportunity to be able to play and be a focal point. I’d be living in Paris. And I think a lot of it for me was just to showcase that I was healthy from the injury that I had in Strasbourg. It was a great time, especially for me getting to play basketballwise. We wanted to win more games, but I was able to experience a different culture.”

Frazier started hearing that Metropolitans 92 could fold due to financial issues and French media articles supported those rumors. The rumors rang true as Metropolitans 92 folded due to financial difficulties in the Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt that the team had resided in for 17 seasons. In a statement, Boulogne-Billancourt Mayor Pierre-Christophe Baguet said, “these painful decisions are unfortunately imposed on us,” and also noted the financial support in recent years.

“There was some chatter about it before that last game,” Frazier said. “And then when the news came out, I started getting all these calls. They saw Wembanyama the [season] before. From there it’s like, ‘Oh, man, the team has decide to fold. Is it a money issue?’ I had a French teammate translate a lot of the stories. They were just saying it wasn’t a money issue, but the mayor of the town didn’t want to fund the team anymore.”

Despite the financial concerns, Frazier said, the Metropolitans 92 gave him a three-bedroom apartment in Paris, a Peugeot car to use and paid on time. He told Davis that his favorite restaurants in Paris were Beef Cut Restaurant, Beefbar and Verde. Frazier also told Davis’ wife, Marlen Polanco Davis, that the exchange rate in Paris works to an American’s advantage and there is a tax credit for purchases upon departure from France. Although Frazier doesn’t speak French, he said, he was able to get by because most people in Paris speak English.

“A lot of times they didn’t speak English until it was time for the bill,” Frazier said with a laugh.

The Metropolitans 92 played their last game on May 11. Frazier, who was in France alone, stayed in Paris for four more days after the season to enjoy the City of Lights before leaving for Houston. He added that Paris was his favorite city in France and described his final days as “joy.”

“I spent time at the Louvre, where you can get to the museum,” Frazier said. “I went to the Palace of Versailles, the garden [The Jardin du Luxembourg]. I touched up on the history of the city and did some shopping, too. I experienced some of the nightlife. I just used that experience as, ‘I’m done. Let’s see what all Paris has to offer.’ I spent a lot of time walking, which was one of the best things I did.

“I drove in, parked by the Eiffel Tower and I just walked. I walked alongside the Seine River. It was beautiful. At that time, it wasn’t raining. It was nice out. People were taking pictures. It was cool to experience the region. You sit outside. Go to a coffee shop. That was my joy those four days.”

So, what’s next for Frazier?

“I’m still waiting to figure it out,” Frazier said. “I’m not calling it a career yet. I’ve been blessed. I’ve played in Greece and France. I’d love to go back to Paris and play for another team in France. But I definitely want to try to experience something else different as well.

“I was thinking maybe Italy. I would love to go out there to experience something nice and to live out there as well.”

---

Black Americans in France is an ongoing series highlighting African Americans living abroad during the 2024 Paris Games.

---

Pianist Kirk Lightsey moved to Paris for good in 1994. When he relocated, Lightsey, 87, became part of the latest wave of African Americans to relocate to the City of Lights.

Since the early 20th century, Paris had been a welcoming magnet for African Americans who saw the country and the city as a haven from the harsh realities of racism in the United States. For generations of Black Americans, Paris presented possibilities, fresh starts, and an escape from the constant drone of racism.

As a celebrated jazz musician, Lightsey also became part of a rich jazz tradition that had intoxicated Parisians since the beginning of the 20th century when jazz was introduced by regimental bands of Black American soldiers who spread the exciting new music across France.

While Paris was by no means a racial paradise, for waves of African writers, musicians and artists, the city offered a safe space where their humanity was not only seen but valued.

“Paris was welcoming,” Lightsey said from his home in Paris during a recent interview. “I felt freer. I felt appreciated. I felt like people were people, and I was just a person to all the people, and I was very appreciated. Being here has been wonderful. It’s been great.”

Born and raised in Detroit, Lightsey began playing piano at age 5 and spent his teenage and early adult years becoming part of the city’s vibrant jazz scene. Ultimately what pushed Lightsey to relocate to Paris was that the weight of racism became too heavy to bear.

The first event occurred when he was serving in the Army.

Lightsey was drafted in 1960 and was a member of the Fort Knox Army Band. During one visit, Lightsey and his then-wife decided to go outside of the base for dinner.

“She was visiting me at Fort Knox. We were starving. We just drove down the hill about 15 minutes from Fort Knox,” he recalled. “I said, ‘I’ve never been to this place, but it looks pretty good, so let’s go in there and get some food.’ We walked in, I had on my uniform and they immediately said, ‘I’m sorry, we don’t serve Black people in here.’ I did not know what to do. The only thing I could do was take Shirley by the hand and walk out. That was just the most outrageous thing that’s ever happened to me as far as racial issues are concerned. And I’m still expected to fight for my country.”

Besides soldiers, Black musicians were not spared the ignominy of racism as they toured.

“Count Basie’s whole band had to do that, many people who were on the road, all these Black musicians during that time had to go through this,” Lightsey said. “That’s why so many Black people who were playing music during this time chose to come to Europe, chose to come to Paris, and they stayed for the most part. They stayed because they knew when they went back to the States, they were going get kicked in the a– by white toes.

“There was no racial issue here [France]. The French people were really happy to accept us as artists and they held us in very high esteem.”

After being discharged, Lightsey became a staff pianist with Motown Records and continued to make his name playing with some of Detroit’s greatest musicians. In the mid-1960s, Lightsey joined trombonist Melba Liston’s all-female band and made the pilgrimage to New York.

After the job with Liston ended, Lightsey moved to California in 1969 to work with singer O.C. Smith. It was during this time that he made his first trip to Paris. He subsequently joined saxophonist Dexter Gordon’s band, returned to New York, and became a fixture on the New York jazz scene.

One evening, Lightsey was returning from a gig on a crowded subway when he was arrested by New York transit police on the nebulous charge of jostling. He later found out that he and other Black passengers had been racially profiled by transit police as part of a pattern that was uncovered when transit police targeted an off-duty Black police officer. Lightsey sued the city and won a healthy settlement after seven years.

“During that time, I was working all over New York and had visited Europe several times,” he recalled. “I played in Paris and Paris seemed like a good place to be.”

Lightsey decided to use the money from the settlement to move himself and his new wife, who was French, to Paris. At age 57, he had had enough.

The subway incident was simply the last straw.

“What was happening politically was a big part of why I left the States and came to Europe,” he said. “The club owners were dying, and things were changing in the business in New York, and it just wasn’t the same feeling. Now it’s even worse than then, but then it was bad enough. It was during a time when lots of American musicians were moving to Paris and to Europe because life in the States was just so ugly for Black Americans and especially Black American musicians. Lots of people moved over here. And I came over here and found lots of people that were friends of mine.”

There was no shortage of work for Lightsey, who by this time in his career enjoyed universal acclaim. He regularly worked in several clubs in Paris, the surrounding countryside and taught in an educational program outside of Paris. Lightsey believes his career rose to another level in Paris.

“Yeah, it did. It went to another level because now not only was I from New York and a player from New York, but that was a great level to be from,” he said. “And I was one of the top calls on the piano in Paris and in other parts of Europe that I’d been to. So, I was on a ladder going up.

“Living in Paris was very easy. I just had to learn the language. But that wasn’t so hard because people in Paris at that time were trying to learn English, so they would practice their English with me back and forth. I don’t need to speak French as much as I did when I first came here.”

Because of the historic lineage of Black jazz musicians in France, Lightsey said, he and other jazz musicians enjoy a level of respect often missing in the United States.

“My French wasn’t bad. It was beginner’s French, but when people would talk to me, they could tell that I wasn’t a French person or an African person, that I was from the U.S. And that gained respect from them,” he said. “To be here and be an American musician and to be a musician from the States and live in Paris was a great honor to them. So, I was greatly respected for being a musician and from the States. I was working all the time. So, it was a great feeling.”

As we ended our conversation I asked Lightsey what, on balance, he had gained from relocating to Paris. “You gain freedom,” he said. “You gain a language. You gain being close to very interesting places, like Germany. You’re close to Vienna, you’re close to other worlds. And that’s great because you can jump on a train and go anywhere.”

How does he see himself? As a Black Frenchman? A Black man living in Paris? “As an American living in Paris with a French family, my French wife and my French daughter,” he said.

Would Lightsey ever consider moving back to the United States?

“Never, even in my next life,” he said. “With what’s going on there politically, it’s nuts. It’s just going crazy.”