He was convalescing in a hospital in Lyon when he met a French officer who promised to help him to become an aircraft gunner. During this conflict he was seriously wounded, which ended his combat but earned him France’s highest military honor, a Croix de Guerre. After a brief stint in the Legion, he became a member of the French army and was with a unit at the Battle of Verdun. He was so enamored with his adopted homeland that he joined the French Foreign Legion in its fight against Germany. In his autobiography “All Blood Runs Red,” he reinvented himself, including the tale that his father was of French ancestry. He was in England long enough to work at a number of jobs-as a street performer, fish peddler, a target at an amusement park, and a boxer.įrance gave Bullard a fresh outlook on life and he thrived in this new wave of democracy where racism wasn’t as limiting. But his stay there was only temporary and England beckoned. In Scotland he was treated like a human being, he related in several accounts. Bullard was 11 and he too fled the scene and then roamed around Georgia for five years.įor a while he lived with a band of gypsies before stowing away on a ship to Scotland when he was 16. His father was able to escape the mob and then went into hiding. One account has him running away from home after a lynch mob arrives at their home. It’s not easy checking the tall tales of his life, whether he actually witnessed his father’s narrow escape from a lynching or of his being stowed away on a ship to Scotland to get away from the racial discrimination in the South. Several biographies and profiles suggest that his parents were Native Americans, his father known as “Big Chief” and his mother, a Creek Indian. 9, 1895, the same year Frederick Douglass died, in Columbus, Georgia, Bullard was one of 10 children.
Chances are, you’ve never heard of Bullard and his airborne exploits, but according to many historians of men and women in flight, he is the African American pioneer in the skyway, particularly as a fighter pilot.īorn Eugene Jacques Bullard on Oct. During a recent conversation with Ed Dwight, once among the most celebrated pilots in the nation, and my goddaughter who is in the process of becoming a commercial airline pilot, I thought of Eugene Bullard.
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