Memorial Day Honors - Eugene Jacques Bullard

Anyone who has followed me for a length of time knows that I’m not a supporter of wars. But I will admit that there are War Veterans throughout history that made me proud to be American and Black. And although Eugene Bullard lived in and fought for France, I still felt it appropriate to add him because he was born in America. Not to mention, he was handsome, and he looks like my father.

I didn’t know anything about Eugene until I started an in-depth search for Black Americans who moved to France pre 1950’s, and I mesmerized by the fact that he was the first African American military pilot and the only black pilot in World War I. He was born in 1894 in Columbus Georgia and as a young adult stowed away on a ship bound for Scotland to escape racial discrimination.

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. 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.

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.