<v Speaker 1>I'm Jerry Broadway, and this is Anonymous America where we

<v Speaker 1>take a deep dive into American history looking for those

<v Speaker 1>little known people who did amazing things and then slipped

<v Speaker 1>through the cracks of time. Back in nineteen sixty, the

<v Speaker 1>President of France came to New York City. Charles de

<v Speaker 1>Gaull was his name, War hero statesman, one of the

<v Speaker 1>most famous men on earth. As a matter of fact,

<v Speaker 1>thousands turned out to see him. And during that visit,

<v Speaker 1>in front of the cameras and the crowds, Charles de

<v Speaker 1>Gaull stopped, opened his arms and embraced a quiet, stooped

<v Speaker 1>sixty five year old American who ran the elevator at

<v Speaker 1>Rockefeller Center. Now, the people watching had no idea who

<v Speaker 1>the elevator operator was. His own neighbors didn't know, his

<v Speaker 1>coworkers didn't know. He rode Americans up and down that

<v Speaker 1>building every day in a plane uniform. And not one

<v Speaker 1>of them suspected that the President of France considered this

<v Speaker 1>man a national hero or why. This is the story

<v Speaker 1>of the elevator man and the RCA building and the

<v Speaker 1>fifty years of history that he carried up and down

<v Speaker 1>in silence for eight ad Productions. This is anonymous America.

<v Speaker 1>Eugene Bullet was born in Columbus, Georgia, back in eighteen

<v Speaker 1>ninety five. He was the seventh of ten children and

<v Speaker 1>the son of a former slave. When he was a

<v Speaker 1>young boy, he watched a mob come after his father,

<v Speaker 1>and although his father survived the night, Eugene never got

<v Speaker 1>over it. His father had often told him stories about

<v Speaker 1>the country of France, a place where he said a

<v Speaker 1>man was just judged as a man and nothing more.

<v Speaker 1>And Eugene decided that if that place was real, he

<v Speaker 1>was going to make it his mission to find it.

<v Speaker 1>And so and so Eugene ran. He left home before

<v Speaker 1>he was a teenager, drifted across the state of Georgia

<v Speaker 1>doing whatever work a young black child could get, and

<v Speaker 1>at around sixteen, he stowed away on a freighter bound

<v Speaker 1>for Scotland. He surfaced in the ports of Britain, made

<v Speaker 1>his way. There was a prize fighter and a good one,

<v Speaker 1>and boxing eventually carried him across the channel to the

<v Speaker 1>city he'd been trying to get to his entire life, Paris, France,

<v Speaker 1>and Eugene discovered that his father was right. In Paris,

<v Speaker 1>he was just a man he later said it was

<v Speaker 1>the first time in his life that he felt free.

<v Speaker 1>So when the country that gave him that feeling went

<v Speaker 1>to war in nineteen fourteen, Eugene didn't hesitate. He was

<v Speaker 1>nineteen years old and he felt that he owed France

<v Speaker 1>debt and he was going to pay that debt, so

<v Speaker 1>he joined the French Foreign Legion. Eugene fought some of

<v Speaker 1>the worst slaughters of the First World War with the

<v Speaker 1>Semi Front, Champagne and finally Verdoon, where in nineteen sixteen

<v Speaker 1>he was gravely wounded. France warded Eugene the Croix de

<v Speaker 1>Guerrere for his valor, but the doctors told them that

<v Speaker 1>his infantry days were over. So Eugene made a bet

<v Speaker 1>with a friend that he could do something that no

<v Speaker 1>black man in history had ever done and earned his

<v Speaker 1>wings as a combat pilot. In nineteen seventeen, he won

<v Speaker 1>that bet. He earned his wings in the French Air

<v Speaker 1>Service and became the first black combat aviator in the

<v Speaker 1>history of the world. An American flying for France, years

<v Speaker 1>before his own country would let a black man anywhere

<v Speaker 1>near a cockpit. Eugene flew roughly twenty combat missions over

<v Speaker 1>the Western front, sometimes with a pet monkey named Jimmy

<v Speaker 1>tucked into his flight jacket, and his fellow airmen soon

<v Speaker 1>gave him a nickname, the Black Swallow of Death. And

<v Speaker 1>then America entered the war, and the United States invited

<v Speaker 1>American pilots who were flying for France to transfer into

<v Speaker 1>the US Army Air Service with officers commissions, and so

<v Speaker 1>Eugene applied. He passed the physical and then he waited

<v Speaker 1>for orders, and the orders never came. Every white American

<v Speaker 1>pilot was taken. Eugene was the only one left behind.

<v Speaker 1>His own country had looked at the most experienced black

<v Speaker 1>aviator on Earth and said not today, And so Eugene

<v Speaker 1>decided he was just going to stay French. After the war,

<v Speaker 1>he became a fixture of jazz age Paris. He was

<v Speaker 1>a drummer, then a manager of a legendary nightclub called

<v Speaker 1>Le Grande Dux, where he worked alongside Langston Hughes and

<v Speaker 1>crossed paths with Josephine Baker, Louis Armstrong and that whole

<v Speaker 1>crowd that Hemingway hung out with. He got married, he

<v Speaker 1>raised two daughters. He built the life that most people

<v Speaker 1>only dream about. Well. When the Second World War came

<v Speaker 1>France called on Eugene again, this time as a spy.

<v Speaker 1>He spoke fluent German and German officers drinking in a

<v Speaker 1>Paris nightclub, never imagined the black club owner was listening.

<v Speaker 1>And when the Germans invaded in nineteen forty, he did

<v Speaker 1>something almost unbelievable. At forty four years old, this veteran

<v Speaker 1>of Verdoon picked up a rifle and fought with French

<v Speaker 1>forces in the defense of Orleans, where he was wounded

<v Speaker 1>by artillery fire. Broken and hunted, he escaped over the

<v Speaker 1>Pyrenees into Spain and made his way back to the

<v Speaker 1>United States, and there the extraordinary man became invisible. In America,

<v Speaker 1>none of what Eugene had done mattered. He found work

<v Speaker 1>as a perfume salesman, a longshoreman, a security guard. Eventually

<v Speaker 1>he took the job that he would hold until the

<v Speaker 1>end of his life, the elevator operator in the RCA

<v Speaker 1>building at Rockefeller Center. Eugene lived in a small Harlem apartment.

<v Speaker 1>Its walls were covered with photographs and medals, and anyone

<v Speaker 1>who came to visit saw those photographs and medals and

<v Speaker 1>thought one of those must belong to someone else. But

<v Speaker 1>France never forgot Eugene. In nineteen fifty four, the French

<v Speaker 1>government flew him to Paris and chose him out of

<v Speaker 1>all the veterans of two World Wars, to help relight

<v Speaker 1>the eternal flame beneath the Arc de Triumph. In nineteen

<v Speaker 1>fifty nine, France made him a Chevalier of the Legion

<v Speaker 1>of Honor, the nation's highest order. That same year, NBC's

<v Speaker 1>Today Show, broadcasting from the very building where Eugene worked,

<v Speaker 1>put him on the air, and America finally got a

<v Speaker 1>loook look at its first black combat pilot. Eugene appeared

<v Speaker 1>in that interview on the Today Show in his elevator

<v Speaker 1>operator's uniform. One year later came the embrace from President

<v Speaker 1>de gaul and a year after that, in October of

<v Speaker 1>nineteen sixty one, Eugene died of cancer in New York.

<v Speaker 1>He was buried in Flushing Cemetery in the uniform of

<v Speaker 1>a French legionnaire. There is one last chapter to Eugene

<v Speaker 1>Bullard's life. In nineteen ninety four, seventy seven years after

<v Speaker 1>the United States Army refused to let him fly, the

<v Speaker 1>United States Air Force posthumously commissioned him a second lieutenant.

<v Speaker 1>The wings his own country denied him in nineteen seventeen

<v Speaker 1>were finally officially his. Throughout his life, Eugene Bullard never

<v Speaker 1>became bitter. Those who knew him in those last years

<v Speaker 1>described a gentle, gracious man who was proud of both

<v Speaker 1>of his countries, the one he served and the one

<v Speaker 1>that took so long to see him. He once said

<v Speaker 1>that whatever happened to him, he had lived as a

<v Speaker 1>free man. He just had to cross an ocean to

<v Speaker 1>do it. That's Eugene Bullard, and that is Anonymous America