Walking The Spirit Tours is a heritage education and travel company that helps people connect to Black heritage in Paris, France and beyond as well as local culture through experiential travel, speaking engagements, and media.
Since 1994, our signature Paris tours and customized itineraries have introduced countless travelers, students, and educators to the rich but lesser known influence of Black history and culture in Europe. Even more so since the global pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement we encourage and make it easy to travel with purpose.
Wanderlust has long guided my professional and personal direction. I was born in England, brought up in Canada, but had a ‘thing’ for all things French since my teens.
Choosing a career in travel naturally appealed to my fascination with how people lived elsewhere. Working as a flight attendant, though, I was never sure, as a Black woman, how ‘friendly’ a town was going to be. From my first trips to Paris right through my first four years as a resident, I was constantly surprised at how little my being Black seemed to register. In fact, I felt oddly anonymous.
And then, taking a course at the Sorbonne University shattered that complacency.
Through my mentor, the late Professor Michel Fabre, director of the Center of African-American Studies, I discovered the jazz musicians, entertainers, writers, intellectuals and artists who had sought out and found personal and professional fulfillment in Paris. Suddenly France became a place where my ‘ancestors’ shared an ongoing, rich cultural exchange with the French. Yet, at the same time, I was becoming aware that others from the African diaspora and former colonies were experiencing a much different, harsher reality.
My ‘raison d’etre’ in Paris shifted. I had finally found my personal connection to this foreign, iconic city, but also to the larger diaspora I’d never experienced anywhere else.
As a researcher by nature, a writer, filmmaker and broadcaster by training, I just had to share this knowledge. That year, 1994, I created my first walking tours and with it pioneered tourism focused on Black Paris.
My mission hasn’t changed: honoring the Black contribution and experience while revealing so many unspoken histories. Our clients come to us from all backgrounds to discover the history and contemporary culture and to actively take part in what I love about France – its quirks, qualities and diverse cultures.
On our tours you benefit from our carefully selected guides who also love sharing their own connection and insights into the city, through their Afro and French roots.
France remains the home in my heart. My guides, trusted partners and I want to welcome you, help plan your exceptional trip. Here where our roots converge.
Josephine Baker’s Chateau des Milandes
