Eugene Bullard was born October 9, 1895, in Columbus, Georgia, to former slave William Bullard and Josephine Bullard.
When he was 12, Bullard witnessed his father nearly lynched. Wanting to escape racial prejudices, he stowed away on a German freighter headed to Scotland. He tried to make his way to Paris, a place where his father told him his skin color did not matter.
Bullard proved to be a talented boxer, allowing him to save money and move to Paris. World War I had begun in the summer of 1914, but Bullard was too young to enlist. By October, at the age of 19, he, along with other Americans, joined the French Foreign Legion.
Bullard witnessed and survived several horrible battles during WWI, some of which lost up to 80 percent of the troops. Because of these losses, his regiment disbanded in 1915. Bullard then joined the 170th Infantry, an elite unit of the French Army. The unit’s symbol was a swallow. As the only Black member of the company, Bullard earned the nickname “hirondelle noire de la mo” or Black Swallow of Death.
Wounded at the Battle of Verdun in 1916, doctors feared Bullard would never walk again. He was awarded military awards for his service, including the Croix de Guerre and the Medaille Militaire. As he was no longer able to fight in an infantry unit, Bullard turned his sights to the French Flying Corps, and on May 5, 1917, he earned his wings, making him the first Black fighter pilot in the world.
With hundreds of other American volunteers in the Lafayette Flying Corps, Bullard fought in over 20 combat missions. When the United States entered the war, the Lafayette Escadrille men tried to join the American flying corps. They accepted only the white pilots.
Later, after an altercation with a French office, Bullard was dismissed from the flying corps and returned to the 170th regiment, where he remained until the end of the war. By the end of the war, he was one of France’s most decorated war heroes, yet virtually unknown in the U.S.
Following the war, Bullard worked as a jazz drummer in a French nightclub and eventually started one of his own, called L’Escadrille. He was friends with several famous people of his time, such as Louis Armstrong, Josephine Baker, Langston Hughes, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Because of his fame, Earnest Hemingway based a minor character in The Sun Also Rises on Bullard. In 1923, he married Marcelle Straumann, the wealthy daughter of a countess, and had a son (who died of pneumonia) and two daughters. The two eventually divorced, but Bullard gained custody of his daughters.
Because Bullard spoke both French and German fluently, he gathered intelligence for the French from his nightclub’s German patrons during WWII. As the German Army approached Paris, he and his daughters moved south to Orleans, and he joined the French 51st regiment. There, he suffered severe wounds in a battle that took every other member of his unit. Friends knew if the Germans caught Bullard, they would kill him, so they helped him and his daughters escape through neutral Spain back to the United States.
Bullard was not a famous man in the U.S. His recovery took a long time, and it was difficult for him to find work. Eventually, he found a job as an elevator operator in New York’s Rockefeller Center. While still unknown as a war hero in the U.S., the French recognized his service in two World Wars. In 1959, they made Bullard a Knight of the Legion of Honor, the highest award given for service to France. Only then did he receive some recognition in the U.S. when the Today Show asked him to appear for an interview.
When Bullard passed away in 1961, he received full French military honors from the Federation of French War Officers. Bullard never stopped loving the United States. Even though he fled the country in fear for his life and denied the opportunity to fly for his country, after receiving the Legion of Honor, he said, “America is my mother, and I love my mother. But as far as France is concerned, she is my mistress, and you love your mistress more than you love your mother, but in a different way.”
In 1994, America reciprocated some of that love back to Bullard when they posthumously made him a second lieutenant in the United States Air Force, acknowledging they made a mistake to deny him that right 77 years earlier.
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