When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939 and England and France declared war in response, the U.S. ambassador to France urged the 30,000 or so Americans living in Paris to get out of dodge. The German war machine storming westward upgraded matters to an emergency, particularly for groups under special threat (for example, Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, Jewish and lesbian, fled Paris for the relative safety of the Rhone Valley). Thanks to the 1936 Olympics, there was no doubt in anyone's mind about the Nazi attitude towards black people, including African-Americans.
So when black/Native American expat Eugene Bullard, a veteran of the French Foreign Legion in World War I, was seriously wounded fighting with the French army during the World War II invasion, a ragtag army of people labored to get him out of France. His doctor gave him food in exchange for a promise that he'd eat it on the way to the American consulate, a Frenchman lent him a bicycle to get there faster, American civilians waiting in line donated their clothes so he wouldn't be conspicuous in his uniform, and the consul spotted him the $30 fee for the passport he didn't yet have.
The concern was not without cause. Even though most of the ~5000 remaining Americans in France and in Paris had little to fear directly from the Nazi occupiers until America's entrance into the war in late 1941, persecution of African-Americans started almost immediately. One of the most visible groups targeted was musicians--"Jewish-Negro jazz" being the Nazis' term for this "degenerate" art. Trumpeter Arthur Briggs found enough fellow black musicians from the US, England, and Caribbean in the concentration camp near St. Denis to start a 25-person orchestra.
Being less prominent wasn't necessarily the solution, either. German soldiers would sling insults at black people on the street, sometimes hoping to spur an action that could lead to their arrest. The ultimate fear was the potential fate that had mobilized so many people to get Bullard out of France: the knowledge that Germans would just randomly kill black soldiers they captured from the French military. Once the Nazis started requiring non-French people in Paris to register officially, the black American population of the city dropped to near zero. Josephine Baker, the astonishing and world-famous dancer, didn't go far at first. She spent some time at her country house running documents for the French Resistance, before going on a morale tour of Allied troops throughout North Africa towards the end of the war.
Recent scholarship and more popular looks at France under Nazi occupation have moved beyond just the stories of flat-out heroes and villains (of which there are many) points to the fraught complexity of people's choices, and the ambiguity of the difference between collaboration and resistance in many cases. For black Americans like Charles Anderson, who thought that the discrimination under the Nazis balanced out with his old life in the post-Reconstruction South, those decisions must have weighed even more heavily.
ETA Further reading!
Great question, and thanks for asking it!
Most left the country before the German occupation, but those who remained faced persecution, arrest and deportation back to the United States unless protected by connections.
Before we get started, it's important to understand why Paris (and northern France in general) was such a haven from black expatriates between the world wars. As Michel Fabre's From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France, 1840-1980 explains, it largely stems from the reputation of America's black soldiers as fierce fighters in the trenches of World War I. This left the French with a positive outlook regarding black Americans, and with few blacks (even French colonials, let alone African-Americans) in the country, they were not considered a threatening minority when they visited or stayed.
In sociology, there's an idea called racial threat theory that states (in rough detail) that in ordinary societies, racial conflict grows as the proportion of a minority grows closer to 50 percent in the general population. In France during the interwar period, the number of black inhabitants was so low as to be negligible when compared to the larger populace. Based on the accounts we have, interracial dating was not condemned as it was in the United States, and as Fabre remarks, "... a black man was still something of a curiosity. But curiosity was not tinged with fear or hostility ─ on the contrary."
That's for the reasons I mentioned above. In turn, the positive view of the French toward African-Americans was reciprocated. As Fabre writes, "As for the image of France in the heart of many a veteran who spoke fervently to his acquaintances back home, it had become, beyond the gay, refined entertainment of the City of Light, that of a land of freedom and fair treatment, 'a paradise for American Negroes.'"
That changed under Nazi German occupation. The Nazi belief in "racial purity" meant no tolerance for even small numbers of minorities. The German belief in a volkisch state meant African-Americans needed to be contained and eliminated. Because they were protected by American citizenship (even if the United States never lifted a finger to protect them), the African-American inhabitants of Paris were not executed; they tended to be imprisoned and deported, as the United States was not at war with Nazi Germany when Paris was occupied.
Tyler Stovall's Paris Noir: African-Americans in the City of Light, Charles Glass' Americans in Paris: Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation and Clarence Lusane's Hitler's Black Victims address your question in part and whole.
As early as October 1939, one month after France declared war on Germany, the U.S. State Department advised all Americans, of all races, to leave the country. Given that memories of WWI were still fresh, Lusane writes, "Most Americans, including African-Americans, caught the first boat or plane they could find back to the United States or some other safe place."
There were exceptions, however, and into spring 1940, with war still distant, it seemed as if stay-behinds like Josephine Baker and Eugene Bullard had the right ideas. Things changed very quickly in May, but Americans were initially unaffected directly. According to Glass, American institutions in Paris (neutral by virtue of the fact that the United States was neutral) remained open.
On June 24, 1940, the Germans started to change that by banning all concerts by African-American musicians. This was a significant thing, because most of the African-Americans who had remained were musicians taking advantage of the Parisian appetite for jazz. This was followed in July 1940 by a German census of foreign nationals in Paris. African-Americans were ordered to report to the police for detainment and deportation proceedings. Some fled but were generally caught while trying to flee the country.
As Glass writes, jazz trumpeter Arthur Briggs was sent to a concentration camp (note that this is not an extermination camp) in late June 1940 at St. Denis, where other black musicians were held. Others who were arrested included singer Roberta Dodd Crawford of Chicago, trumpeter Harry Cooper and classical composer Maceo Jefferson.
According to Glass, Henry Crowder ─ who had a 13-year relationship with shipping heiress Nancy Cunard ─ was giving a concert in Belgium when the Germans invaded. Crowder fled to Paris on a train (which was bombed), and after he kept going on foot, he was arrested by the Germans.
Josephine Baker had a fascinating experience. She believed she was a Frenchwoman more than an American (and not without reason), so during the German occupation, she stayed at her country chateau and joined the Resistance. For two years, she used her status as a musician to smuggle materials and people from place to place, and after Operation Torch landed Allied soldiers in northern Africa in 1942, she fled there.
On the flip side of Baker's experience was that of Charles Anderson, whom Lusane identifies as living through the occupation "relatively undisturbed." Lusane speculates that might have been due to his age ─ he came to Paris from Illinois in 1884 and was in his 80s at the time of the occupation.
By and large, however, African-Americans were simply forced out of France, either willingly (albeit in flight) or unwillingly, through arrest and deportation. Stovall writes that they did not face "the murderous racism that threatened [Paris'] Jewish communities," but because the Nazis denied them the ability to work and do business as musicians, club operators and entertainers, there was no point in staying.
Bulletin:
You want to use this thread to make a joke about the Holocaust? You want to use this thread to make a racist joke? You want to combine the two? Please understand the following:
You are not edgy and cool.
You are not unique and original.
You will be banned.