Impressive People: Stories of Remarkable Lives - Sykalo Eugen 2025

Eugene Bullard – First Black fighter pilot (WWI), jazz club owner in Paris, and elevator operator in America

He was a fighter pilot in a war where Black men weren’t supposed to fly. A jazz club king in a Paris that never slept. And then, quietly, an elevator operator in Rockefeller Center, pressing buttons for men who didn’t know he’d once chased dogfights across European skies. It sounds like fiction — like Forrest Gump dipped in jet fuel and saxophone smoke — but it’s true. Every strange, shimmering bit of it.

Bullard’s life begins in Georgia, 1895. A place where the air could cut your skin with its heat, and the social order was branded in iron. His father, a Haitian-descended former slave, told him: Somewhere in the world, a Black man can be free. Find it. The message landed like prophecy.

At eleven, Bullard ran away. Not the kind of childish flounce out the back door, but a wild, committed sprint from a lynch-hungry South. He hitched rides, wrangled work with gypsies, and by some miracle of charisma and daring, found himself as a teen stowaway on a ship bound for Europe. He wasn’t yet old enough to shave, but he’d already become one of the most determined self-exiles in American history.

And Paris — beautiful, broken, brilliant Paris — gave him what Georgia never could: breath.

Bullard slipped into the city like ink into water. He hustled as a boxer first, bobbing through underground rings, the kind where blood and cigarette ash streaked the floor. Then came music. Always music. Jazz was blooming — that urgent, off-beat throb of something new and deeply Black — and Bullard found himself surrounded by men who’d reinvented sound: Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Josephine Baker. They became his friends, sometimes lovers, sometimes ghosts in the Parisian night.

Then came war.

When World War I erupted, Bullard didn’t wait for an invitation. He enlisted with the French Foreign Legion — a ragtag collective of dreamers, drifters, and madmen. By 1916, he’d already taken a bullet in the thigh and crawled through barbed wire to live. He could’ve quit. He didn’t.

Instead, he climbed higher.

Bullard trained as a pilot — something no Black American had done before, and no military brass in the States would have allowed. The cockpit was a narrow cradle of wind and metal, but up there, Bullard was free in the truest sense: no color lines, no sidewalks to cross, just the scream of the propeller and the infinite blue. He painted a gorilla on his Spad VII fighter plane and called it Tout le Sang Qui Est Dans Mon Corps — “All the Blood in My Body.” He meant it.

It didn’t matter that he was a legend in the making. When the U.S. joined the war and he applied to fly under the American flag, the answer was as clipped as it was predictable: No. Skin color trumped valor. The same country that birthed him refused to let him rise above its ceiling.

So he flew for France. And when the armistice came, he landed in Paris again — not as a hero, not exactly. But as a man who’d survived.

Bullard didn’t stop moving. He opened a nightclub, L’Escadrille, just off the Champs-Élysées. The walls pulsed with swing. Champagne sweated in silver buckets. Ernest Hemingway drank there. So did Fitzgerald. Even Prince of Wales Edward VIII stopped by to dance. It was the Harlem Renaissance in exile — a rare moment when being Black in Paris meant being seen.

But as jazz filled the streets, a darker rhythm swelled beneath. Fascism slithered in through radio waves and angry speeches. When Hitler rose, Parisian Jews weren’t the only ones who felt the tremor. Bullard had seen this movie before, and he wasn’t about to watch the sequel from a front-row seat.

By the time World War II ignited, he was nearly 45 — but again, he volunteered. Not in the air this time, but underground. Bullard spied for the French Resistance, listening, translating, risking everything. Eventually, Nazi bombs found his building. He barely escaped alive.

In 1940, Paris fell. And with it, Eugene Bullard’s kingdom.

Back in the U.S., he should have been greeted as a war hero. Instead, he returned to the kind of life that would humble lesser men. Jobs vanished. Accolades? None. He worked as a longshoreman, a perfume packer, and eventually, a uniformed elevator operator in Midtown Manhattan.

He wore white gloves.

Not that he ever really disappeared. It’s just that America — fat on postwar glory — didn’t care to look. Not at the quiet Black man who’d outflown their finest, outboxed their brutes, and outlasted their wars. He belonged to another narrative, one they hadn't yet scripted.

Bullard didn’t complain. Not publicly, anyway. But there are stories — stories of him sometimes muttering in French under his breath, of co-workers sensing the gravity in his silence. There’s something particularly cruel about becoming invisible in the place that made you.

In 1959, France remembered.

President Charles de Gaulle made Bullard a Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur. The highest national award. They flew him back to Paris, briefly restoring his myth. He was honored in full military regalia — medals catching sunlight like they once caught bullets. Then he came home again. Back to the elevator.

He died in 1961. At the time, most Americans had never heard his name.

But the winds shifted.

In the decades that followed, historians and writers began to stitch together his story: the first African American fighter pilot, the decorated veteran, the nightclub visionary. The man who chose France not because he hated America, but because he couldn’t survive inside its locked room.

Today, there’s a statue of Eugene Bullard at the Museum of Aviation in Georgia. In 1994, the U.S. Air Force posthumously made him a second lieutenant. Too late, of course. But still.

What Bullard left behind wasn’t just medals or milestones — though those are extraordinary. It’s the echo of a life that refused to live small. A reminder that real heroes don’t always come wrapped in parades. Sometimes, they press elevator buttons with gloved hands and carry entire histories in their silence.

He flew with blood in his body. And dignity in his bones.

He lived like a ghost. But he never vanished.