The United States Air Force commissioned a man who had been dead for 33 years. In a ceremony at the Museum of Aviation at Robins Air Force Base, Georgia, a relative accepted the commission certificate for Eugene Jacques Bullard. The paperwork corrected a historical omission. Bullard, a Columbus, Georgia native, was the first African American combat aviator in history, but he had never served the United States in uniform.
Bullard fled American racial violence as a teenager, boxed in Europe, and joined the French Foreign Legion in 1914. After being wounded at Verdun, he transferred to the French air service, earning his wings in 1917. He flew over twenty combat missions and claimed at least one aerial victory. When the U.S. entered the war, he applied to fly with the American Expeditionary Forces. His transfer was denied; U.S. military policy explicitly forbade Black pilots.
He returned to a life of obscurity in New York, working as an elevator operator. The 1994 commission was symbolic, a bureaucratic gesture of atonement. It acknowledged that the nation he was born in had institutionally rejected the service it later decided to honor.
The commission did not rewrite history. It highlighted the contradiction within it. Bullard's actual rank and honors—a French *soldat* and *tireur*, awarded the *Croix de Guerre*—were earned in a foreign army that did not judge him by his skin. The American lieutenant's bars, arriving decades late, served mainly to underscore the cost of the prejudice that had kept him from wearing them in life.