Eugene Bullard
Eugene_Jacques_Bullard,_first_African_American_combat_pilot_in_uniform,_First_World_War.jpg
Eugene Bullard (9 October1895 - 12 October, 1961) was the first African-American, and the first black military pilot.
Born Eugene Jacques Bullard in Columbus, Georgia, one of ten children. His father was known as "Big Chief Ox" and his mother was a Creek Indian. Bullard stowed away on a ship bound for Scotland to escape racial discrimination (he later claimed to have had witnessed his father's narrow escape from lynching as a child). While in the UK he worked as a boxer and also worked in music hall. On a trip to Paris he decided to stay and joined the French Foreign Legion upon the outbreak of war in Europe in 1914. Wounded in the 1916 battles around Verdun, and already awarded the Croix de Guerre, Bullard transferred to the French Aéronautique Militaire and was eventually assigned to 93 Spad Squadron of the Lafayette Escadrille on August 17, 1917, were he flew some twenty missions and is thought to have shot down two enemy aircraft.
With the entry of the USA into the war the US Army Air Service convened a medical board in October 1917 for the purpose of recruiting Americans serving in the Lafayette Escadrille. Although he passed the medical examination, Bullard was not accepted into American service because blacks were barred from flying in US service at that time. Bullard was discharged from the French air force on November 11, 1917 after getting into a fight with an officer while off duty and was transferred back to the French infantry in January 1918 were he served until the Armistice.
Following the end of the war, Bullard remained in Paris. He began working in nightclubs and eventually owned his own. He married a French countess but the marriage soon ended in divorce and when she died shortly after he took custody of their two daughters. His work in nightclubs brought him many famous friends, among them Josephine Baker, Louis Armstrong, and Langston Hughes. At the outbreak of the Second world war in 1939, Bullard (who knew German), readily agreed to a request from the French to spy on German agents in Paris. After the German breakthrough and invasion of France in 1940, Bullard took his daughters and fled south, out of Paris. In Orleans he joined a group of soldiers defending the city and was wounded in the fighting. He was helped flee to Spain by a French spy and in July 1940 he returned to the United States.
Back in the US, Bullard got a job as an elevator operator in Rockefeller Center, a job he would hold until his retirement. In 1954, the French government invited Bullard to Paris to rekindle (together with two Frenchmen) the everlasting flame at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier under the Arc de Triomphe and in 1959 he was made a chevalier (knight) of the Legion of Honor. Even so, the last years of his life were spent in relative obscurity and poverty in New York City where he died of stomach cancer on October 12, 1961. He was buried with honors by French War Officers in the French War Veteran's section of the Flushing Cemetery in New York. In 1972 exploits as a pilot were put in print with the book The Black Swallow of Death.
Reference
- Herbert Molloy Mason Jr., High Flew the Falcons: The French Aces of World War I, New York: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1965.
- Lloyd, Craig. Eugene Bullard: Black Expatriate in Jazz Age Paris. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2000.]
External links
- Eugene Jacques Bullard on the US Air Force government site
- Short biography by Master Seargent Anthony Pendleton
- About the book "Black Expatriate in Jazz Age Paris"
- The medals of Eugene Jacques Bullard
- American Volunteers in the French Foreign Legion - Eugene Bullard