Eugene Bullard (9 October 1894 – 12 October 1961) was the first African-American military pilot and the only black pilot in World War I.
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He was born Eugene Jacques Bullard in Columbus, Georgia, in the United States. His father was known as "Big Chief Ox" and his mother was a Creek Indian; together, they had ten children. 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 United Kingdom he worked as a boxer and also worked in a music hall. He was the first African American to fly an airplane in combat.
On a trip to Paris he decided to stay and joined the French Foreign Legion upon the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Wounded in the 1916 battles around Verdun, and awarded the Croix de Guerre, Bullard flew as a member of the Lafayette Flying Corps in the French Aéronautique Militaire, assigned to 93 Spad Squadron on 17 August 1917 where he flew some twenty missions and is thought to have shot down two enemy aircraft.( Allen Laws & EUAN CRAW)
With the entry of the United States into the war the US Army Air Service convened a medical board in August 1917 for the purpose of recruiting Americans serving in the Lafayette Flying Corps. Although he passed the medical examination, Bullard was not accepted into American service because blacks were barred from flying in U.S. service at that time. Bullard was discharged from the French Air Force after fighting with another officer while off-duty and was transferred back to the French infantry in January 1918, where 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 establishment. He married the daughter of a French countess but the marriage soon ended in divorce, with Bullard taking 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 World War II in 1939, Bullard, who spoke German, readily agreed to a request from the French to spy on German agents frequenting his club in Paris.
After the German invasion of the French Third Republic in 1940, Bullard took his daughters and fled south out of Paris. In Orléans he joined a group of soldiers defending the city and suffered a spinal wound in the fighting. He was helped to flee to Spain by a French spy and in July 1940 he returned to the United States.
Bullard spent some time in a hospital in New York for his spinal injury, but he would never fully recover. During and after World War II, when seeking work in the United States, he found that the fame he enjoyed in France had not followed him to New York. He worked in a variety of occupations, as a perfume salesman, a security guard, and as an interpreter for Louis Armstrong, but his back injury severely restricted his activities. For a time he attempted to regain his nightclub in Paris, but his property had been destroyed during the Nazi occupation, and he received a financial settlement from the French government which allowed him to purchase an apartment in New York’s Harlem district.
In 1949, a popular concert by African-American entertainer and activist, Paul Robeson in Peekskill, New York to benefit the Civil Rights Congress resulted in the Peekskill Riots caused by anti-Communist and anti-civil rights members of local Veterans of Foreign Wars and American Legion chapters and also by local residents.[1] The concert, organized as a benefit for the Civil Rights Congress, was scheduled to take place on August 27 in Lakeland Acres, just north of Peekskill. Before Robeson arrived, a mob of locals attacked concert-goers with baseball bats and rocks. Thirteen people were seriously injured before the police intervened. The concert was postponed until September 4.[2]
Following the September 4 concert, Bullard was knocked to the ground and beaten by the angry mob which included members of state and local law enforcement. The beating was captured on film and can be seen in the 1970s documentary The Tallest Tree in Our Forest and the Oscar winning Sidney Poitier narrated documentary Paul Robeson: Tribute to an Artist. Despite recorded evidence of the beating, no one was ever prosecuted for the assault. Graphic photos of Eugene Bullard being beaten by two policeman, a state trooper and concert goer, were later published in Susan Robeson's pictorial biography of her grandfather, The Whole World in His Hands: a Pictorial Biography of Paul Robeson.[3]
In the 1950s, Bullard was a relative stranger in his own homeland. His daughters had married, and he lived alone in his apartment, which was decorated with pictures of the famous people he had known, and with a framed case containing his fifteen French war medals. His final job was as an elevator operator at the Rockefeller Center, where his fame as the “Black Swallow of Death” was unknown.
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 Légion d'honneur. 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 military honors by French officers in the French War Veterans' section of Flushing Cemetery in the New York City borough of Queens.
In 1972, his exploits as a pilot were published in the book The Black Swallow of Death.
On 23 August 1994, thirty-three years after his death, and seventy-seven years to the day after his [physical that should have permitted him to fly for his own country] rejection for U.S. military service in 1917, Eugene Bullard was posthumously commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the United States Air Force.
In 2006, the movie Flyboys loosely portrayed Bullard and his comrades from the Lafayette Flying Corps.
   | American Volunteers in the French Foreign Legion – Eugene Bullard - American Volunteers in the French Foreign Legion, 1914-1917: Eugene Bullard |
| | National Museum of the United States Air Force: Eugene Jacques Bullard - Fact Sheets : Eugene Jacques Bullard : Eugene Jacques Bullard |
| | ''New Georgia Encyclopedia'': Eugene Bullard - New Georgia Encyclopedia: Eugene Bullard (1895-1961) |
| | ''Columbus Ledger-Enquirer'': "A chat with Abdul Salis", September 21, 2006. - cache:XnpdXuFocnkJ:www.ledger-enquirer.com/mld/ledgerenquirer/15566922.htm bullard "abdul salis" - Google Search |
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