The Black Swallow of Death, Eugene Jacques Bullard
Seeing his father narrowly escaping lynching in Georgia caused Eugene Jacque Bullard to hop a tramp steamer at the age of 16, working his passage to France. Enlisting during the Great War, he fought as part of the French Foreign Legion on the western front as a machine gunner.
Bullard was in some of the worst battles of the war, including the Somme and Verdun. During 1915 his united received 50% casualties and was broken up. He joined the famed 170th Regiment and was awarded several medals for gallantry, including the Croix de Guerre. He was wounded at Verdun and had to recuperate for months. He decided to go to aviator school so he could continue service.
In October of 1916, Bullard signed on with the French air service and began flight training. By the following year he was piloting Spads and Nieuports with the 93rd Escadrille against German warplanes over the Verdun sector. A capable aviator, Eugene quickly earned the nickname the “Black Swallow of Death” (an homage to his former regiment, the 170th known as Les Hirondelles de la Mort). Heralded as one of the only black pilots of the war (and a decorated one at that), he enjoyed notoriety in the French press.
Following America’s entry to the war, Bullard applied for a transfer to the nascent U.S. Army flying corps that was assembling in France. Despite his considerable combat experience, the American military rejected him because of his race
After the war he lived in Paris, where he worked at a prize fighter and as a jazz drummer at the French night club Zelli's. He was successful in both and later toured in Alexandria, Egypt, waging prize fights by day and jazz concerts by night.
He became a well known figure in higher social circles in Paris, going on to start his own athletic club and becoming one of the first personal trainers for the 'culture physique' in the country.
As a war hero, Jazz musician, club manager, and with access to the elite of Paris, he managed to parlay that into ownership of his own night club. It thrived, and there he was friends with legendary performers of the black scene in Paris. These luminaries included Josephine Baker, Louie Armstrong, and Langston Hughes.
When war broke out against the Hun once again in 1939, French intelligence approached Bullard. His night club was very popular with the Germans in the city, Bullard himself spoke flawless German, and he accepted a role as a spy to help his adopted country. When Paris fell in 1940, Bullard lost everything, and he returned to the United States.
He attempted to return after the liberation of the City of Lights, but his club had been burnt to the ground. He was forced back into a very segregated society. In 1949, he was a central figure in the Peekskill riots.
The riots occurred because of a concert that black activist Paul Robeson gave for civil rights. Ex-Soldiers accused Robeson of communist sympathies, and beat dozens of people with bats, rocks and clubs. Bullard himself was attacked and beaten by law enforcement. No charges were ever pressed against his attackers.
Robeson lived in obscurity in the States, getting a job as an elevator operator and living in a small New York apartment. But France remembered. In 1954, he was one of three Americans who were requested to come to Paris and light the fire at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier under the Arc de Triomphe.
And when President Charles de Gaulle visited in 1959, he demanded to meet the famous Black Swallow of Death, soldier, aviator, and spy. de Gaulle was saddened at how he had been treated in America. He was made a Chevalier (Knight) of the Légion d'honneur by General Charles de Gaulle, who called Bullard a "véritable héros français" ("true French hero"). He also was awarded the Médaille militaire, another high military distinction, the 3rd highest award offered by France.
Bullard is one of a long line of black heroes long overlooked in American history, from Mary Bowser to John Smalls to Bass Reeves. It is good that their stories are now beginning to be told, and that men and women such as these are no longer held in obscurity.
