Know Your History: Eugene Bullard (9 Oct. 1894 – 12 Oct. 1961)

Eugene Bullard (9 October 1894 – 12 October 1961) was the first African-American military pilot and the only black pilot in World War I.

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 made 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 a 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.

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.

Sources
^ Robeson, Susan. Paul Robeson:The whole World in His HandsChapter 5,The Politics of Persecution,pg.181
^ Ford, Carin T. Paul Robeson:I Want to Make Freedom Ring, pgs.97-98 Chapter 9, 2008.
^ Robeson, Susan. Paul Robeson:The whole World in His HandsChapter 5,The Politics of Persecution,pg.182-183