Eugene Bullard

Eugene Jacques Bullard was born on October 9, 1895, in Columbus, Georgia, the seventh of ten children. His father, William Octave Bullard, had been born enslaved on the Stewart County property of the planter Wiley Bullard and was of African American and Muscogee (Creek) descent; he later worked for the W.C. Bradley cotton merchant firm in Columbus. His mother, Josephine Thomas, of the same African American and Creek heritage, supported the family through laundry and sewing.

Fleeing the racial violence of the American South as a boy, Bullard made his way to England and then to France, where he found a dignity long denied him at home. When the Great War came, he enlisted in the French Foreign Legion in October 1914 and fought in the Moroccan Division of the 170th Infantry Regiment. Wounded at Verdun, he earned the Croix de Guerre for his courage.

Declared unfit for the infantry, he turned to the sky. Licensed as a pilot on May 5, 1917, he flew combat missions with the Aéronautique Militaire's Lafayette Flying Corps that autumn — becoming the first Black combat aviator in the world. Between the wars he became a celebrated figure in Montmartre, a nightclub owner among the luminaries of Black Paris, and later a member of the French Resistance.

In 1959 France made him a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur, and Charles de Gaulle called him a true French hero. Long unrecognized in the land of his birth, Eugene Bullard rose from a Georgia cabin to the clouds of history — and we honor the courage that carried him there.