"Eugene Jacques Bullard" (Jacques-prounce Jacks).(October 9 1894-October 12 1961)

Was the first black Military pilot and the only black pilot in World War 1.He was born in

Columbus,Georgia.His father was William O.Bullard,also known as "Big Chief Ox"His mother was a Creek Native American named Josephine Thomas.Together,they had ten children.Eugene stowed away bound for Scotland to escape racial discrimination (he later claimed to have witnessed his father narrow escape from lynching as a child).While in the United Kingdom he worked as a boxer and also in a music hall.On a trip to Paris he decided to stay and joined the French Foreign Legion upon the out break of World War 1 in 1914.Wounded in the 1916 battles around Verdun,and awarded the Croix de Guerre He flew as a member of the Lafayette Flying Corps in the French Aeronaultique Militaire,assigned to 93 Spad Squadron on August 17 1917 where he flew some twenty missions and is though to have shot down two enemy aircraft.With the entry of the United States into the war the US Army Air Service convened a medical board in August 1917 for the purpose of recruiting Americans serving in the Lafayette Flying Corps.Although he passed the medical examination,Eugene was not accepted into American service because blacks were barred from flying in the U.S. service at that time.Eugene was discharged from the French Air Force after fighting with another officer while off-duty and was transferred back to the French infantry in January 1918,where he served until the Armistice.Following the end of the war,he remained in Paris.He began working in nightclubs and eventually owned his own establishment.Eugene married the daughter of a French countess but the marriage soon ended in divorce,with Eugene taking custody of their two daughters.His work in nightclubs brought him many famous friends,among them Josephine Baker, Louis Armstrong, and Langston Hughes.At the outbreak of World War 2 in 1939,Eugene who who spoke German,readily agreed to a request from the French to spy on German agents frequenting his club in Paris.After the German invasion of the French Third Republic in 1940,He took his daughters and fled south out of Paris.In Orleans  he joined a group of soldiers defending the city and suffered a spinal wound in the fighting.He was helped to flee to Spain by a French spy and in July 1940 he returned to the United States.Eugene spent some time in a hospital in New York for his spinal injury,but he would never fully recover.During and after World War 2,when seeking work in the United States,he found that the fame he enjoyed in France had not followed him to New York.He worked in a variety of occupations,as a perfume salesman,a security guard,and an interpreter for Louis Armstrong,but his back injury severely restricted his activities.For a time he attempted to regain his nightclub in Paris,but his property had been destroyed during the Nazi occupation,and he received a financial settlement from the French government which allowed him to purchase an apartment in New York Harlem district.In 1949,apopular  concert by black entertainment and activist,Paul Robeson in Peekskill,New York to benefit Civil Rights Congress resulted in the Peekskill Riot caused by anti-Communist and anti-civil rights members of local Veterans of Foreign Wars and American Legion chapters and also by local residents.The concert,organized as a benefit for the Civil Rights Congress,was scheduled to take place on August 27 in Lakeland Acres,just north of Peekskill.Before Paul arrived,a mob of locals attacked concert-goers with baseball bats and rocks.Thirteen people were seriously injured before the police intervened.The concert was postponed until September 4th.Following the September 4 concert,Eugene was knocked down to the ground and beaten by the angry mob which included members of state and local enforcement.The beating was captured on film and be seen in the 1970s documentary The Tallest Tree in the Forest and the Oscar winning Sidney Poitier narrated documentary Paul Robeson:Tribute to an Artist.Despite recorded evidence of the beating,no one was ever prosecuted for the assault.Graphic photos of Eugene being beating by two two policeman,a state trooper and a concert goer,where later published in Susan Robeson's pictorial biography of her grandfather,The Whole World in His Hands: a Pictorial Biography of Paul Robeson.In the 1950s Eugene was a relative stranger in his own homeland.His daughters had married,and he lived alone in his apartment,which was was decorated with decorated with pictures of the famous people he had known,and with a framed case containing his fifteen French war medals.His final job was an elevator operator at the Rockefeller Center,where his fame as the "Black Swallow of Death"was unknown.In 1954,the French government invited him to Paris rekindle (together with two Frenchmen) the everlasting flame at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier under the Arc de Triomphe,and in 1959 he was made a chevalier (knight) of the Legion d'honneur.Even so,the last years of his life were spent in relative obscurity and poverty in New York where he died of stomach cancer on October 12,1961.He was buried with military honors by French officers in the French War section of Flushing Cemetery in the New York City borough of Queens.In 1972,his exploits as a pilot were published in the book The Black Swallow of Death.On August 23 1994,thirty-three years after his death,seventy seven years to this day after his physical that should have been permitted him to fly for his own country and his rejection for U.S. service in 1917 Eugene was posthumously commissioned as Second Lieutenant in the United States Air Force.In 2006,the movie Fly boys loosely portrayed Eugene and his comrades from the Lafayette Flying Corps.Medals: Knight of the Legion d'honnneur Medaille Militaire Croix de guerre, Volunteers Cross,Wounded Insignia, WW1 commemorative medal , WW1 Victory  medal,Freedom Medal,WW2 commemorative medal.