Eugene Jacques Bullard – An African-American Fighter Pilot and Hero Long Before the Tuskegee Airmen

The name Eugene Jacques Bullard is not widely known in this country, but it should be. The ironies and the realities of history that surround his personal story are part of the reason for the fact that this man’s story is not well known. Some of those realities remain stubbornly with us today, but the good news is that we have grown in our awareness, and we can learn and grow more, as individuals and as a society, by looking at these small, set-aside, loose-leaf moments of history that reveal the failures and faults as well as the successes of our communal story.

As individual human beings and as a society, we are always at the crossroads of choice. We can always choose to continue down the hard-beaten, well-known, yet scarred paths of history, or we can, as the great American poet, Robert Frost, suggested, take the road less traveled by. That is, in fact, what we are always challenged to do as individuals or as a society; do we continue down the known paths that, though they are filled with troubles and difficulties (of our own making), are “familiar,” or do we choose to take what appear to be the more tense and challenging unknown paths that could lead us to better things?

This is an ever-present question for all of us. The following is an example of how one person chose to answer that question and how the society he lived in during his time responded to it.

Photo: DVIDS

Eugene Bullard was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1895. He was the grandson of slaves. His own life and time were deeply affected by the existing societal realities of segregation and racial discrimination. The young teenage Bullard would have the frightening and psychologically disturbing experience of witnessing an attempted lynching of his own father.

His solution then was to get away, to escape the pain. He stowed away on a ship headed for England and ended up in London, where he began making a living as a boxer and entertainer. By 1913, he would have some 42 professional fights under his belt and was living in Paris, France.

When WWI broke out, he, like many other American expatriates, joined the French Foreign Legion and would serve in the trenches at Champagne and Verdun. The trench warfare of WWI was some of the bloodiest in history. It was war by attrition. Bullard would be wounded three times while serving in the trenches, always recovering and returning to the lines. The third wound proved to be serious enough to have him removed from the war and medically discharged, as he had lost most of his teeth and had a large hole in his thigh from artillery shrapnel. The doctors told him that he may never walk again. But that would not be the case. He recovered again and transferred to the French Air Service, where he began flying fighter bi-planes against the Germans.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Dsdugan

In 1916, when America entered the war, he tried to enter the American Flying Service but was denied because of his race. The Americans tried to block him from flying for the French as well, but the French weren’t having that.

Because of Bullard’s service both in the trenches and in the French Air Services, he was awarded France’s highest military awards: the Croix de Guerre and the Medaille Militaire. He was so good as a pilot that he was given the nickname “The Black Sparrow.” He was both a highly decorated war hero and an honored person in France.

Bullard remained in France after the war and would eventually own some nightclubs in Paris. When WWII began to threaten, and because he could speak English, French, and German, he was recruited by the French Resistance to gather information that he might overhear in his nightclubs.

Photo: Flickr/Georgia National Guard

When the Germans were about to take Paris, Bullard was smuggled out of France through Spain by French friends, and he made it back to New York City, where he found work in the Staten Island Shipyards. He had been out of the country for three decades by that time, but the societal realities in America had not changed.

In 1954, then President of France Charles de Gaulle invited Bullard to Paris to light the eternal flame at the French Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Arc de Triomphe, a conspicuous honor indeed. While there, de Gaulle and the country of France also named Bullard a Chevalier de la Légion D’Honneur of France.

While Bullard was a recognized, honored, and known figure in France, back home in America, he was an unknown elevator operator. In 1960, President Charles de Gaulle visited the United States and asked about the French hero Eugene Bullard. No one had heard of him. The FBI had to be used to locate him, and he was taken for a quick meeting with the President of France. This was picked up by the media, as reported in a Wounded Warrior Project article. Bullard was “invited to appear on The Today Show on NBC.” The irony here was that Bullard was an elevator operator in that same building.

Photo: U.S. Air Force

Bullard died a year later in 1961 at the age of 66. He is buried in the Federation of French War Veterans Cemetery in Flushing, New York.

Eugene Jacques Bullard’s life was shaped by the realities of his time. As a Black man in this country in the late 1800s and the first half of the 20th century, those realities included the injustices of racism and concepts of segregation. He did what he had to do to survive and to thrive, despite those realities.

Bullard’s was not an easy life. He found more human acceptance and equality in France than in his own country, but he was an American in his mind. He was a man of courage, of loyalty, even when that loyalty to his own country was denied the opportunity to be acted upon in WWII. When he came home, it was to the same conditions he had left three decades before. Even so, it did not stop him. He went to work, like everybody else.

The Veterans Site is proud to bring the life story of Eugene Jacques Bullard to your attention. It was a life lived with dignity, courage, and determination against great odds. We honor this American and heroic war veteran. We will not forget.

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