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Why is it that when a white person does something amazing, they don’t give them the nickname “The White [something]”? Is it because of racism? I think it has to do with racism. Anyway, Eugene Bullard, nicknamed the Black Swallow of Death, was America’s first military pilot. But not for America. He flew for France. Because racism.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: October 19, 1914--
Born in 1895 in Georgia, Bullard’s father’s ancestors had been enslaved in Haiti, and his mother was Indigenous. And of course, being that this was Georgia around the turn of the century, he witnessed a metric fuck-ton of racism, including an attempt to lynch his father.
Bullard heard tales of a wonderful far-off land called France where racism didn’t exist. It wasn’t true, but at least there were a lot more opportunities for Black people there, so at the age of 11 he ran away, determined to make it to Europe. He spent time traveling with English Romani and worked as a stable boy, eventually stowing away on a German freighter bound for Scotland in 1912. Now 17, he found his way south to London and worked as an actor and boxed for a living. After a match in Paris, he decided to stay. Then war broke out.
On October 19, 1914, Eugene Bullard enlisted and was assigned to the Marching Regiment of the French Foreign Legion. He saw a lot of action, fighting in one of the most decorated units in the French Army, which had a brutal casualty rate. Already weighed down with medals, Eugene was wounded in the spring of 1916 at Verdun and while convalescing learned to fly, rejoining the war as a fighter pilot in May of 1917. But his flying career was short-lived. The Americans showed up and said hey we know the war has been going for three years but we’re ready to join in now, and they took the American volunteer pilots who were already flying for the French into their own air force, but of course no Black people allowed. Bullard was sent back to the French infantry. Because racism.
After the war he became a jazz musician. In the lead up to World War II he spied on the German patrons in his club for the French, because did I mention he’d become fluent in German? When the fucking Nazis invaded in 1940, Bullard fought to defend his adopted homeland at the age of 44. He was badly wounded, escaped to Spain, and then eventually returned to the U.S. where he lived a relatively quiet life in New York, except for appearing in a 1959 interview on the Today Show to talk about his wartime exploits. Bullard died in 1961 at the age of 66.
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