Harlem in Montmartre

PETER ONUF: We’re back with BackStory. I’m Peter Onuf.

ED AYERS: I’m Ed Ayers.

BRIAN BALOGH: And I’m Brian Balogh. Today on the show, American Exodus. We’re telling the stories of all those folks who decided that their future lay outside the United States. We’re asking why they left, and what they took with them.

Black Southerners in the early 20th century were one group eager for new frontiers. Failing crops and the oppression of Jim Crow fed the South to North exodus, known as the Great Migration. Starting around 1910, more than 1 1/2 million black people packed up, then moved to cities such as New York, Chicago and Cleveland in search of better jobs and better lives.

PETER ONUF: But a few black Americans, instead of going North, went East to Europe. One of them was a Georgia teenager named Eugene Bullard. Fed up with the racism of the South, in 1912, Bullard ran away from home and stowed away on a ship headed for Scotland. BackStory producer Chioke I’Anson tells us what Bullard found when he got there.

CHIOKE I’ANSON: Eugene Bullard was surprised when he first set foot on land. He recalled in his memoir that he encountered something largely unfamiliar up to that point in his life.

MALE VOICE: Everyone I saw smiled and looked at me pleasantly and spoke politely. Some even called me darkie, but in such a way that I realized they did not mean to hurt my feelings. And people would shake hands with me and invite me to tea. Just imagine, how a colored kid from Georgia felt in a country where everyone– and they were white too– were treated just like one of their own.

CHIOKE I’ANSON: But young Bullard was not the only black Americans to learn just how different things were in Europe. In London, he stumbled upon the Negro Quarter– a community of expats, mostly entertainers. They had come to Europe to perform, but they stayed because of the warm reception. Bullard joined this community. He took up prizefighting alongside boxing legends like the Dixie Kid and Jack Johnson. Just months after making landfall, the stowaway from Georgia was already making a name for himself.

In the summer of 1914, the Germans began their march on France. Bullard was in Paris at the time, and he wanted to fight. So he enlisted with the French Foreign Legion. He got into the French Air Force as a machine gunner. Soon after, he was given his wings, becoming the first black American fighter pilot in history.

MALE VOICE: It seemed to me that about midnight that same day, every American in Paris knew that an American Negro by the name of Eugene Bullard, born in Georgia, had obtained a military pilot’s license.

CHIOKE I’ANSON: When the Americans entered the war in 1917, Bullard applied to fly with the United States Air Service. He passed the physical, but he never received orders to transfer.

MALE VOICE: I was more and more puzzled, until suddenly it came to me that all my fellow countrymen who transferred were white. Later, I learned that in World War I, Negroes were not accepted as fliers by the United States Army. This hurt me deeply.

CHIOKE I’ANSON: Bullard was able to fly alongside whites in France. But the country was a far cry from racial utopia. French Africans in the ’20s condemned France for racist colonial policies like forced labor. But the French didn’t see black Americans the way they saw their own colonial subjects.

Most French people decried American segregation and prided themselves on their tolerance toward African Americans. Some even defended blacks against attacks from visiting white Southerners. This era of acceptance persisted after the war, when Bullard became a jazz drummer and opened a nightclub in the Montmartre district. While southern migrants to Chicago dealt with the fallout from race riots, black expats were enjoying the nightlife in Bullard’s club, alongside Louis Armstrong, Ernest Hemingway, and Josephine Baker.

By the late ’30s, Paris nightlife was dying down. A new threat of war loomed. In 1940, the Germans invaded once again. Once again, Bullard enlisted and fought for France. He was wounded in combat and retreated to Spain, where he got on the first ship he could board. It was headed to America. After being gone for decades, he was going back to his home country.

Back in the States, Bullard couldn’t recover any of what he owned in Paris. Poor and largely unknown, he took up work as a perfume salesman and an elevator operator. Eugene Jacques Bullard spent his remaining years in Harlem. He died of stomach cancer in 1961. He was buried in his uniform by members of the Legion.

A news report spoke of the death of the French war hero. To this day, his grave site in Queens is maintained by the Federation of French War Veterans. At the end of his life, he reflected on what inspired him to stow away so many years before.

MALE VOICE: It was to find equal treatment, to find freedom, that I struggled so long and hard to get across the ocean to France. It was to defend the freedom of our allies that I fought in two bloody wars. Never have I gone against my principles about freedom for each decent person and freedom for democratic nations. Any contempt shown to a fellow human being just because of his race, creed, or color, I consider a sickness.

CHIOKE I’ANSON: Bullard also wrote that despite all the barriers he had faced, he continued to love America, his home country. But it was France that loved him back.

BRIAN BALOGH: That was BackStory Chioke I’Anson. Special thanks for help with that story to Craig Lloyd, professor emeritus at Columbus State University.