Eugene Jacques Bullard and the Paris Jazz Age (Pt. 2)

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to stuff you missed in history class, a production
of I heart radio. Hello and welcome to the PODCAST.
I'm Tracy Vie Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Today is
the second part of our two parter on Eugene Jacques Bullard.

(00:22):
In part one we talked about his upbringing, his leaving
the US to go to Europe and his becoming the
first black American combat pilot. Uh. There were a handful
of other black combat pilots, but not from the United States. Um,
so that is the first that he is recognized as. Uh.

(00:44):
He had a whole long life beyond that, though, and
that is what we're going to talk about today. After
World War One ended, Eugene Jacques Bullard returned to Paris.
He was a war hero thanks to his infantry service
in the Front Foreign Legion and Hundred and Seventieth Infantry
Regiment of the French army and his service as a

(01:05):
combat pilot in the Lafayette Esquadrille, which was a unit
of mostly American pilots who flew for France. Before the war,
he had been a boxer and a performer in various
Vaudeville and MINSTREL troops. And while he wanted to get
back to boxing, he also needed to make ends meet
while he got back into boxing condition and continued to
recover from a serious injury to his leg that he

(01:27):
had gotten during his service. So he decided to become
a musician, specifically a jazz drummer. This sounds maybe a
little counterintuitive. I know if I needed to go make money,
I'm going to be a jazz drummer. Probably would not
be at the top of the list. But jazz really

(01:48):
surged in popularity in France towards the end of World
War One. One big reason was the three sixty nine
regimental army band, also known as the Harlem hellfighters. Marching
and leading this band was black musician and composer James
Reese Europe, who had recruited the band's members, including traveling
to Puerto Rico and recruiting eighteen Afro Puerto Ricans from there.

(02:13):
The Harlem Hellfighters Band arrived in Europe in nineteen eighteen
and introduced audiences all over Europe to jazz, specifically to
jazz performed by black musicians, not kind of jazz derived
from Black People's music and performed by white people, which

(02:33):
was what most people's experience had been so far. Most
people who had been performing things like ragtime and other
musical styles that evolved into jazz in Europe had also
been white before this point. At the same time, things
were shifting in neighborhoods around Paris. MONMASCA had been established
as a center of entertainment, culture and art, home to

(02:55):
Bohemians Avant Garde artists in a thriving nightlife. This is
come up on various episodes of our show before, including
our episode on French artists, Marie Laurence, who hosted various
people connected with the cubist movement in her Montmartre apartment
prior to World War One. During the war, artists and
performers started moving from Montmartre to Montparnasse on the other

(03:19):
side of the sin, and many of the cabarets and
music halls in Montmartre closed down. A lot of these
spaces were small and they were very well suited to
performances by jazz ensembles. So as the war ended, the
demand for jazz music combined with these newly available nightclubs
and concert halls to bring a thriving black community to Montmartre.

(03:44):
Some of these new clubs and restaurants and other venues
were owned by white people and others were black owned.
In addition to people like Eugene Bullard who were already
living in Europe, performers from the US started coming to
France hoping to find a home in this burgeoning music scene.
There were also black people from France's colonies in Africa

(04:06):
and the Caribbeans, some of whom had been sent to
France to study in one of Paris's universities. A number
of factors in the US were a part of this
influx of black people, including black musicians, to Paris. Some
people were hoping to escape from widespread racism, which became
increasingly violent after the war. We talked about this in

(04:27):
our Harlem Hell Fighters Episode that was a Saturday classic
in and in our episode on the Red Summer of
Nineteen nineteen that came out in June of nineteen. The
Eighteenth Amendment to the U S Constitution went into effect
in nineteen twenty, banning the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages,
and that prompted people whose livelihoods had been built around

(04:49):
performing in nightclubs and bars to leave. Other black American
performers who worked and established businesses in France during this
era included Josephine Baker, Ada Smith, also known as brick top,
and Adelaide Hall. So even though he was pretty new
to being a drummer, there was enough demand for musicians
in Paris that bullard started getting gigs pretty quickly. He

(05:13):
joined the House band at a club owned by Joe Zelli,
who was born in Italy and immigrated to the US
before returning to Europe around nineteen ten Zelli was nicknamed
King of cabaret keepers and ran enormously popular clubs in Molmarch.
Bullard was hired to play the drums and to work

(05:35):
as the club's artistic director, booking acts to perform at
the club and also hiring and managing other employees. As
a side note, Ernest Hemingway's novel the Sun also rises
is based on his experiences in Europe, particularly Paris and Pamplona,
and there is some speculation that an unnamed black drummer

(05:56):
playing at Zell's in the book is in fact Eugene Bullard. So,
as we talked about in part one, one of the
reasons Bullard had left the United States was to try
to escape from racism. He had heard that in Europe
racism wasn't as prevalent as in the US. He had
described his arrival in Europe as a relief. He no

(06:16):
longer felt that he was continually at risk or just
faced with ongoing hostility from white people. He had definitely
experienced discrimination. We talked about a lot of ways that
he had in part one, but it just wasn't on
the scale of what he had lived through in the
United States. This started to shift a little bit after

(06:38):
World War One in Paris, though a number of factors
had shaped racial attitudes in France before this point. France's
colonial empire included territory in the Caribbean, North Africa and Asia,
and there was widespread racial prejudice against people of color
from all of these colonized areas. The actions of the

(06:59):
French colonial naments in these areas could also be appalling. Uh,
we acknowledge that, but that's also kind of beyond the
scope of what we're talking about here today. At the
same time, the number of people from any of these
areas in France was relatively small. Many were the children
of the most affluent and elite who had been sent
to France to study, and they were perceived more as

(07:21):
exotic outsiders. So that was the case before World War One.
The first world war brought larger numbers of people of
Color into France and also into Europe more broadly. We've
already mentioned the two hundred thousand Black Americans who served
in Europe during the war. France also recruited more than

(07:42):
five hundred thousand soldiers from its colonial territories, including from
West Africa, Morocco and Madagascar. Some of these people were
recruited by force. Although African soldiers often served in Africa,
some of them also served in continental Europe. The French
government brought in laborers from their colonial territories as well

(08:05):
and contract workers from China. Incidents of racist violence and
xenophobic violenced against foreign workers from other parts of Europe
really started to escalate in France starting around nineteen seventeen
after the war, France saw some of the trends we've
talked about in the context of the United States, as

(08:26):
returning white soldiers found that they were now competing with
people of color the jobs that they had previously held.
As large black communities settled in places like Montmatre, this
made them targets as well. Adding to all of this
were white American G I S who did not return
to the US immediately or who came back to France,

(08:46):
and they pushed for the same systems of segregation and
white supremacy that they were used to at home. Of course,
all of this effected Eugene Bullard. In May of Nineteen nineteen.
He stood up at a cafe and accidentally bumped into
a white officer behind him, and this led to an
altercation in which the officer knocked bullard unconscious. Bullard went

(09:09):
to the hospital and was released the next day. And
then somehow this turned into a weird case of mistaken
identity in which Parisian newspapers reported that the Dixie kid
had been killed by a white American army officer. For
a refresh from part, one black American boxer, Aaron Lester Brown,
was known as the Dixie Kid. Some reporters seemed to

(09:30):
have thought Bullard was the dixie kid. There's just the
whole very irritating confusion of two different black men and
kind of conflating them in this reporting. I have this
vision in my head of how this happened, which is
that somebody said that black American boxer got knocked out. Oh,

(09:51):
of course that was that one. Yeah, it's when people
started saying that Bullard was the Dixie kid that I'm like, okay,
that those were two different people. Now, Um, and this
is an aside, they reported that he had been killed,
not just yeah, they reported that he had been killed
and not just entered. There was just a very inaccurate uh.

(10:16):
Here's the thing. This was not an isolated incident. One
of the sources used to this episode described Bullard as
never passing up the chance to punch a racist. Bullard
filed a libel suit against the French edition of the
Chicago Tribune, which had published an article about an incident
in which bullard punched a man who was subjecting him

(10:36):
to a racist tirade. The Tribunes reporting was false and defamatory,
claiming that Bullard was armed with brass knuckles, which he
was not, and implying that his transfer from the infantry
to aviation was motivated by cowardice. The article also falsely
claimed that, once Bullard was trained as a pilot, that
he had refused to fly. The French edition of the

(10:58):
Tribune was forced to print bullard's rebuttal of this story
on Ma and the Chicago defender reprinted that rebuttal in
the United States. Yea, his rebuttal clearly spelled out that
he was in fact a war hero and that their
reporting of him was racist and faults. So that happened

(11:20):
actually not that long after Bullard's boxing career ended. He
had taken a six month break from his job at
Zeli's when he got a contract to box and Alexandria, Egypt.
He was badly injured in a match on a nine
and really couldn't box anymore after that and for the
next couple of decades his career was focused mostly on

(11:41):
music and clubs, and we will get to that after
a quick sponsor break. On July see Eugene Jack Bullard
married Marcell El Eugenie Henriette straman. Sometimes she has described

(12:04):
as a countess. Bullard said as much in his autobiography,
but she was not a countess. Her parents ran a
successful grocery business and she was a Modiste. They were
I mean they did well for themselves, but they were
not fancy rich people in the way that she has
described sometimes. While bullard seems to have had exaggerated the

(12:25):
straman family's financial situation. He also said that the difference
in their economic background raised a lot more eyebrows than
the fact that he was black and she was white.
They went on to have three children together, jacqueline in
four Eugene Junior in ninety six and Lolita in n
Eugene junior sadly died of pneumonia while he was still

(12:46):
a baby. Bullard kept working as a drummer and as
artistic director at Zeli's. In he bought his own nightclub,
Legrand Duke. Although it was a small club, it became
incredibly popular with regulars including people like Ernest Hemingway and
F Scott Fitzgerald. Louis Armstrong and fats waller performed there,

(13:07):
as did Josephine Baker from time to time. She also
babysat for Bullard's daughter, Jacqueline. Lankston Hughes also worked at
La Clan Duke as a dishwasher and Cook while living
in Paris at the age of twenty two. The same
year that Bullard bought Le Grand Duke, a memorial to
the Lafayette Flying Corps was dedicated near Paris. This monument

(13:30):
was meant to recognize all the members of the Lafayette Escadrille,
as well as Americans who flew with other French units.
They were all kind of loosely grouped together in this
informal designation of the Lafayette Flying Corps. This memorial still
exists today. It serves as the final resting place for
most of the American pilots who were killed while flying

(13:51):
for France and World War One. Those who were missing
in action or who are buried elsewhere are represented there
with empty tombs. Even though Bullard had been part of
the Lafayette Escadrille, he was not even told that dedication
was happening. He was not on the guest list. One
of the other pilots, Ted Parsons, came by the Grand

(14:12):
Duke and took him to the dedication, which was on
July four. Bullard also discovered that his name had been
left off the monument's list of pilots. He considered this
to be truly egregious, especially since the monument did list
people who had never actually flown. One was Dr Edmund Gross,

(14:33):
who was involved with the creation and management of the
Lafayette Esquadrille but was not a pilot. And who apparently
kept Bullard's name from being included. Yeah, there's a long
documented back and forth of Bullard trying to get his
name included with all the other names of the men
he had flown with. After the Great Depression started, the

(14:53):
Grand Duke started to struggle financially and eventually bullard sold it.
After that he opened a smile dollar bar which he
named the Les Gradule Club. It's a little weird to
have the and also the La Pastro from the French name.
That that's how I kept finding it referenced. Bullard also
started his own athletic club where he worked as a

(15:15):
massage therapist and a personal trainer. Some of the same
people who had played at the Grand Duke came to
the Athletic Club for exercise or relaxation, and it catered
to a range of well known Parisians and expatriates. Bullard
also arranged musical performances for various charities and philanthropic events,
including greeting American mothers whose sons had been killed in

(15:39):
action during the war when they arrived in France to
visit their graves or to attend memorials. In nineteen thirty
five Jean and Marcel divorced, and this is another place
where his account of their relationship doesn't really line up
with the historical record. He claimed that she inherited a
lot of money after her father's death and that she
wanted him to give up working so that they could

(16:01):
live in luxury. He did not want to be a
kept man and he refused, which ended their marriage. He
wrote it because they were both Catholic, they never officially
divorced and she died a few years later. They did
officially divorced, though. That divorce was finalized on December five
and unless her father had also inherited money from someone

(16:24):
else in the family or had some other money somewhere,
like his estate as a Grosser, would not really have
been enough to provide for a family to live the
rest of their lives without working, especially because bullard made
it sound like she kind of wanted them to be
high society people. Marcel also did not die shortly after

(16:44):
they split up. She lived until I feel like that's
the harshest burn ever to just tell people your ex
has passed. I'm sorry, Oh yeah, she's yead right here.
One of the things that's really distressing to me is.
It's not clear whether are his children knew that their
mother was still living. It's it's it's a little vague.

(17:04):
There is some speculation about why bullard would have fabricated
such easily verifiable details in his autobiography. It is possible
that he was trying to protect his daughters from some
kind of speculation or maybe unpleasant information about himself or
about their mother. He got custody after his daughters after
the divorce, at which point they were nine and twelve

(17:26):
and attending a convent boarding school. By the late nineteen thirties,
bullard's violent altercations with racists had expanded to including violent
altercations with Nazis. That might be more of a refinement
than an expansion, I don't know. One of them had
been a client at his athletic club. Bullard had twenty

(17:48):
one flags hanging in the gym that represented the nationalities
of all its various members, and this client wanted him
to add the Nazi flag. Bullard threw him out. He
so had at least one altercation with German men out
on the streets of Montmart eventually, Paris municipal detective George
La planquet approached Bullard about gathering information from Germans and

(18:12):
passing it to the French Military Intelligence Service, Le Diizzy
M bureau. Bullard knew German pretty well. He had started
to learn it aboard the Marta Ross when he originally
left the US for Europe. Bullard was assigned to work
with Cleopatra Terrier, also known as Kitty, who bullard had
seen around the bar and who he had assumed was
a sex worker. It turned out that she had started

(18:34):
actively spying on Germans in an attempt to avenge the
murder of her father by a German during World War One.
Bullard started eavesdropping on German patrons at the bar and
the athletic club and also striking up conversations with them.
Sometimes he and terrier worked together as a team at
the bar. She would flirt and he would sort of

(18:55):
play two stereotypes of black men as hapless or ignorant,
and then they would pass everything they had learned back
to the intelligence service. But other people noticed that Bullard
was suddenly spending a lot more time talking to Germans
and they grew suspicious of him. On July two nine,
he was shot in the abdomen by Justin Peretti. Peretti

(19:18):
was inebriated and thought that Bullard was spying for Germany,
not spying on Germans for France. Peretti also accidentally shot
himself during this attack. He survived. I think he accidentally
shot himself in the buttocks, as you do. So bullard

(19:39):
was immediately taken to the hospital and doctors initially did
not think he would live. He did live, though, and
he was released six days later. PERETTI's brothers apologized to
bullard on his behalf and they bribed him not to
press charges. They sort of framed this as wanting to
compensate him for the at that his bar had to

(20:01):
be closed. In the wake of all of this, it
does not appear that Peretti was ever charged with anything.
If he was, I was not able to find that out.
After Germany invaded Poland on September one, ninety nine people
started leaving Paris, especially Americans and others who were not
from France, and we're worried about whether they'd be able
to go home if they stayed. Bullard initially kept up

(20:24):
his spy work and kept Les Caudrille Open to feed
and entertain people, but eventually he had fewer and fewer patrons,
and mandatory blackouts caused him to have to close up
early every evening. He sold his car and he started
focusing on making sure his friends who couldn't get out
of Paris just had enough to eat. He would do
the shopping with a hand cart that he made, buying

(20:46):
whatever he could find an afford, and then the bar's
cook would make it into a stew to feed as
many people with it as possible. Once most of the
people that Bullard knew were safely out of Paris, he
closed up the bar and the athletic club. Wealthy American
woman named June juet James invited him and his daughters
to stay with her in new west of Paris, with

(21:08):
bullard working as her chauffeur and waiter. At one point
she was helping arrange a volunteer ambulance corps and hosted
a dinner for potential funders and organizers. One of its
guests was once again Dr Gross and, as we mentioned
in part one, he had helped organize the American ambulance

(21:29):
field service, probably why he was there. Bullard was wearing
his dress uniform during this dinner and gross had expressed
surprise that one of his medals was the Medai Milito,
which was awarded for acts of bravery against an enemy force.
Bullard responded, quote, Oh, I thought you kept all my records,
just as you kept the scroll issued me by the

(21:51):
French government, as it was to every member of the
Flying Squadron. And then Bullard walked away, and this was
the last time he and gross ever saw each other. Yeah,
that's a scroll we mentioned in part one that he
was supposed to get, and gross apparently never gave it
to him. Sometime after this dinner, the intelligence service called
Bullard back to Paris and he briefly tried to reopen

(22:14):
the bar, but soon after that he decided to try
to rejoin his old unit, the hundred and Seventie Infantry Regiment,
which he had heard was fighting about a hundred miles
east of Paris. Before he left, Kitty terrier promised him
that she would keep his children safe. He seems to
have really genuinely loved and doated on both of them.

(22:35):
We're going to talk about Eugene's efforts to serve in
World War Two after we have a quick sponsor break.
When Eugene Jock Bullard decided to try to rejoin the
French infantry. He was forty four and he spent day

(22:57):
is going all around France, mostly on foot, as he
tried to connect to the hundred and Seventieth Infantry, which
he had served in before, or really to just any
other units that he heard were fighting nearby. And what
he encountered on the way was horrific. There were huge
waves of starving refugees, villages that had been attacked and
at one point a child standing next to the badly

(23:19):
mutilated body of his mother. Bullard finally found a different unit,
the fifty first infantry, in Orleans on June fifteenth. The
major in command had also been an officer at Verdun,
where Bullard had fought during World War One, and he
accepted Bullard service and he assigned him to a machine
gun company. Just three days later, an artillery shell exploded,

(23:44):
killing eleven French soldiers and badly injuring Bullard, who was
the only one of the group that was near this
explosion to survive. The explosion threw him into a wall
and he lived only because he kind of glanced off
the wall at a angle rather than being thrown directly
into it. But one of his vertebrae was fractured. Bullard

(24:06):
did not want to give up at this point, but
his commanding officer was worried about his safety. Beyond that
of other soldiers, Bullard was a black man. He was
a widely known hero from the First World War. He
had been working in intelligence. There were understandable concerns about
what would happen to him if the Nazis captured him

(24:28):
and how news of his capture could affect the morale
of other soldiers. So bullard was ordered to get to
Spain and from there to go to the United States.
Bullard spent a whole day on foot, at first using
his rifle as a crutch and then abandoning that for
a stick because he thought that the rifle might seem threatening.

(24:48):
He got to a military hospital, which treated him as
best they could and wrapped his bag to try to
stabilize it. As he continued south. He got to be
a Ritz not far from the Spanish border on June twenty.
It four days after being injured. When bullard had left
the United States. Almost three decades before, passports were not

(25:08):
required for travel around Europe and most people just didn't
have them. Although bullard had toured around a lot of
Europe when he was a boxer. He had not gotten
one at that point either, so when he tried to
get passage to the United States, he had to try
to prove who he really was. The console that beer
it's questioned him and other people who knew him who

(25:31):
happened to be passing through beerits as they tried to
get out of Europe as well. So people were vouching
for him and it was established that he was who
said he was, that he really was from the United States.
He was finally approved for us passport, but then he
had to go back to Bordeaux to get it. Bullard
was afraid of what would happen to his belongings if

(25:51):
he was captured, so he left everything but the clothes
he was wearing behind. American aviator R C Guarts, known
as Craney, had also flown for France during World War One,
shipped Bullard's belongings to the US for him care of
Roger Baldwin at the A C L U offices in
New York. Bullard went to Bordeaux, roughly one miles away

(26:13):
by bicycle and then returned. His friend Charlie Levy was
carrying refugees out of France across the Spanish border in
an ambulance, and Bullard got a ride with him. Eugene
Jacques Bullard finally got to Spain on July second nineteen
forty and departed for the US ten days later. He
arrived in New York harbor on July eight. Rooms had

(26:35):
been arranged for all the American veterans of World War
One who were on the ship with him, but not
for him, who was the only black veteran on board.
He was able to stay with an acquaintance he had
known in Paris who had an apartment in New York,
and to pick up all of his stuff from the
A C L U office where it had been sent.
Once it got there, bullard eventually moved into the predominantly

(26:57):
Puerto Rican neighborhood of Spanish Harlem and he lived there
for the rest of his life. But he also spent
a lot of time in Lower Manhattan, which had a
large French community. Among other things, bullard attended mass there,
along with meetings of the Federation of French veterans of
the Great War. He also received treatment for his spinal
injury at a French hospital. After arriving in the US,

(27:19):
Bullard also immediately started trying to get his daughters out
of France. He worked with the Consulate and with William
C bullet, who bullard had met while bullet was in
Paris serving as ambassador to France. His daughters were also
evacuated from France to Spain and they arrived in the
United States on February three nine. Bullard tried to make

(27:43):
ends meet through an assortment of odd jobs, starting with
being a security guard. He also spent a lot of
his time working with the France called MEM or France forever,
which was the international arm of the Free France Movement.
The Free France Movement supported Charles de Gaulle and the
French government in exile in London, as well as French
resistance efforts. Super Quick Recap here. After Germany defeated France,

(28:07):
the French third republic was dissolved. In the French state
that was established in its place was primarily run from
the spot town of vichy. The vichy regime collaborated with
the Nazis, while the free France movement continued to fight back.
Bullard's work with free France included trying to recruit black
pilots and airplane mechanics to serve in the free French forces.

(28:29):
At this point, the US was already recruiting black people
into the military, including pilots. The tuskegee airmen had been
established that January. Bullard's thoughts aren't this aren't documented anywhere,
but presumably he thought black people should have the opportunity
to fight for France as part of an integrated unit,
as he had done, rather than fighting for the US

(28:50):
and a segregated one. We've also talked in some of
our episodes about the military service of black people during
this time, of the idea that people were fighting for
a country that was not reading them as equal citizens,
and Bullard may have been motivated by the idea that
there was more equality in France and his experience than
in the United States. Bullard also traveled around the US,

(29:12):
visiting family members he had not seen in decades and
introducing them to his daughters. This included making a trip
to Columbus, Georgia in nineteen six, and he was continually
confronted with how different the US was than the way
he had lived in Paris. He was invited to a
dinner honoring members of the French Foreign Legion in Nineteen
forty two, but he got an anonymous letter warning him

(29:36):
not to come because, quote, in the states, white and
colored don't mix at social functions. During the peak skill
riots in nineteen forty nine, someone spit on him and
he spit back, leading to his being beaten by a
police officer and losing most of the site in one
of his eyes. While leaving peak skill, he had an
altercation with a bus driver who tried to make him

(29:58):
sit in the back. You can expect a future episode
on the peak skill riots, because that is a whole
other story certainly worthy of talking about. Yeah, it's been
on my list forever and I was like, well, this
seems like a good reason to bump it up to
the top. Here's the transition. Boy Bullard also made some
trips back to Europe, but he did not think it

(30:20):
was possible to move back there. The building that had
housed les caudrill burned down during the war. He didn't
receive any kind of compensation for it. He did continue
to be honored for his service, though. In nineteen fifty four,
France brought him back for a Bastille Day observation. He
was one of the three men who was part of

(30:41):
re lighting the flame at the tomb of the unknown soldier.
There are actually some pictures of him like laying a
wreath of flowers there on October nine of nineteen fifty nine.
He was also made a night in the French Legion
of Honor at a ceremony that took place in the
French consulate in New York. That happened on his sixty
four birthday. Toward the end of his life, bullard started

(31:02):
working on an autobiography called all blood runs red, although
it was never published. He worked with an assistant, Louise
Fox Connell, because he didn't think he could write well
enough in English. Just a note that there is also
a biography by that same title. That is a different work,
although the nineteen seventy two biography titled the black swallow

(31:23):
of death quotes from that one extensively. Yeah, if you
go buy a copy of a book titled All Blood
Runs Red, it's going to be a different thing. Um.
There are still copies of it in archives though it exists.
It was just never published. In nineteen fifty nine, Eleanor
Roosevelt wrote about Bullard and her column my day. That
was after Louise Fox Connell had sent her some clippings

(31:46):
about Bullard to sort of try to work up some
advanced publicity about their memoir and progress. At that point
Bullard was working as an elevator operator at Rockefeller Center.
Somebody made the connection that the Black Elevator operator at
Rockefeller Center who wore French military medals on his uniform
was the same person that Eleanor Roosevelt had written about

(32:08):
in her column. After that he was invited to be
on the today show that aired on December of nineteen
fifty nine. In nineteen sixty, French President Charles de Gaul
visited New York and Bullard was invited to meet him.
He was a v I p guest and a member
of degall's honor guard. On October twelfth nineteen sixty one,
Eugene Jacques Bullard died of intestinal cancer in New York

(32:32):
at the age of sixty six. He was buried at
the Federation of French War Veterans Cemetery and Flushing New York,
wearing his French military uniform. In nine four the US
air force posthumously promoted him to second lieutenant, a rank
that would have allowed him to fly for the US
had it been allowing black pilots in World War One.

(32:53):
On October nine nineteen, a statue of Bullard was unveiled
at the Museum of Aviation at Warner Robbins Air Force
Base in Georgia. There is also a bust of him
in the collection of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
I'm glad I finally got to do the episode on Him,
and I'm also glad I waited a while to do
it because there was definitely way more information available than

(33:15):
back in like Sten Ish, when people started sending us
the viral facebook post sing you should do an episode
on this guy. Yeah, uh, do you have some listener
mail for us? I do. It's a listener tweet. This
tweet came from Susie, who said Hey, at mimst in
history and at one hundred nine nine native, you both
covered the lowry war this week. Love when two of

(33:39):
my faves overlap. And then uh, Smiley faced with hearts emoji. Um,
native American calling, which is who has the twitter handle
one native quote. tweeted that and said happy coincidence. Missed
in history. Let's coordinate next time. So total random coincidence.
We talked about the lowry war during the same week

(34:00):
as native America calling did uh an episode that was
about multiple different indigenous outlaws. I super recommend going and
listening to this episode. Number One. Native America calling is
a show that airs live on the radio, so it's
one of those things where there's like very clear specific

(34:20):
times that you have to do the ad breaks. So
if you're listening to it and you're like, why did
they cut that person off, that's why that was an ad.
was going to go there. Number One, uh. It starts
with news updates that are related to indigenous people in
the US and if you are not up to speed
on various social and news issues that affect the indigenous

(34:40):
community like that is a minute to get a glimpse
of that. Uh. And then they talked to multiple different people, um,
about indigenous outlaws related to their specific indigenous tribe or nation. Um.
I super recommend it because you're hearing directly from people
about their own UH indigenous heritage. The person who talks

(35:05):
about the LOWRY WAR UH is nancy fields. Nancy fields
is actually one of the people I had seen on
a panel Um, that was by the North Carolina Museum
of history. That was part of the research for the
lowry war episode. So in addition to talking to Nancy fields,
the host of that episode, Seawan Spruce, talks to some

(35:26):
other indigenous elders about people from their own tribe, nations,
uh past. So I downloaded that as soon as I
got this and I listened to it again. It is
a radio show that it also comes out as a podcast,
which you can find, I imagine, in any podcast APP.
I founded an apple podcast and they're also at native
America calling dot Com. Um. So thank you so much

(35:50):
for to Susie for drawing our attention to the fact
that we had this weird, totally random coincidence with a
completely different show about the same subject. That does happen
from farm to time, UM, and I'm glad I got
the chance to listen to that myself as well. If
you'd like to write to us about this or any
other podcast, where at history podcast, at I heart radio

(36:11):
DOT com. And you'll also find us all over social
media at miss in history. That's where you'll find our facebook, twitter,
pinterest and instagram. And you can't subscribe to our show
on the I heart radio APP or wherever else you
like to get your podcasts. Stuff you missed in history
class is a production of I heart radio. For more

(36:32):
podcasts from I heart radio, visit the IHEART radio APP,
apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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