Eugene Bullard: Black Expatriate in Jazz-Age Paris

Abstract

By any measure, Eugene Jacques Bullard (1895–1969)—best remembered as the first African American fighter pilot—led a remarkable life. Born in Georgia, Bullard was inspired by his father's accounts of France as a country free from racial prejudice, and he stowed away on a merchant ship bound for Europe in 1912. Put ashore in Aberdeen, he went to Liverpool and London, working as a prizefighter and fairground attendant. Moving to France in 1913, Bullard joined the Foreign Legion on his nineteenth birthday and was wounded at Verdun. He subsequently graduated from aviation school and served with distinction in the French Flying Corps, but he was refused a transfer to the U.S. Army Air Corps after America entered the war in 1917. Returning to Paris, Bullard was frequently involved in brawls with white Americans over incidents of racial prejudice. He became a jazz drummer and the owner-manager of a nightclub in Montmartre. His patrons and acquaintances included such Jazz Age luminaries as Sidney Bechet, Anita Loos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Cole Porter, Charles Chaplin, Josephine Baker, Mabel Mercer, and the Prince of Wales. In 1923, Bull-ard married into a prominent Parisian family and had two daughters (a son died in infancy). An active member of the French underground, he fled Paris in 1940 following the German occupation and returned to America. For the last thirty years of his life, he lived in Spanish Harlem and held a variety of unskilled jobs. Prominent in New York City's French community, Bullard attempted (unsuccessfully) to involve the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in the Free French cause, secured the repatriation of his daughters to the United States, and was severely beaten by thugs at a Paul Robeson concert at Peekskill, New York, in 1949. In 1953 he served as an advance agent and translator for a European tour by Louis Armstrong, and the following year he was invited by the French government to participate in the Bastille Day ceremonies in Paris. On his sixty-fourth birthday Bullard was awarded the Legion of Honor. Appropriately, he was buried with full military honors in the French War Veterans' Cemetery in Flushing, New York.