Awesome Dudes

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 Lafayette Flying Corps in the French Aéronautique Militaire and was eventually assigned to 93 Spad Squadron on August 17, 1917, were he flew some twenty missions and is thought to have shot down two enemy aircraft.

quoted from Wikipedia

That’s right. You may have heard of the Tuskegee airmen, but this man beat them by more than 20 years. Not only was he the first black fighter pilot, he also fought in the ground war as a member of the french foreign legion, as a volunteer in some of the most deadly battles ever fought. When asked why he joined he replied “It must’ve been curiosity because it couldn’t have been sense”.

After the war, Bullard married a count’s daughter and opened a nightclub in Paris,
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 from 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 never fully recovered. 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 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 15 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, he spent the last years of his life 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: The Incredible Story of Eugene Jacques Bullard, The World’s First Black Combat Aviator by P.J. Carisella, James W. Ryan and Edward W. Brooke (Marlborough House, 1972). This book, with jacket art by famed WWI aviation illustrator George Evans, is part of the Bullard display at the National Museum of the United States Air Force near Dayton, Ohio.

On 23 August 1994, 33 years after his death, and 77 years to the day after his 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. The film features digital dogfights, and Abdul Salis portrays Eugene Skinner, the character based on Bullard.

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