Play celebrates a hometown hero
In this town that respects and reveres its military traditions, it took almost a century — and as of now, it’s literally a century — to fully recognize one of its own as the legendary figure that he was and should always be.
For Eugene Jacques Bullard, born in Columbus and decorated as one of the true Allied heroes of World War I, that recognition might have been slow in coming — at least in the United States — but it’s fitting that it is now coming from the community from which he set out to find his destiny so long ago.
Many people know the basic outlines of Bullard’s life story. Born in the Rose Hill area in 1895, he ran away from home at 11 and made his way to Atlanta, then to Scotland and eventually to Europe, where he would distinguish himself first as a French soldier who earned the prestigious Croix de Guerre at Verdun, then as the first — the world’s first — black combat pilot.
In 2000, Columbus State University historian and archivist Craig Lloyd authored the excellent and eminently readable “Eugene Bullard: Black Expatriate in Jazz Age Paris.” If you have not read this compelling, entertaining and moving account of Bullard’s life and career, do yourself a favor and get a copy at the library or bookstore.
Now a local writer and playwright has penned “ACE: The Eugene Bullard Story.” It is a play written, as it should be, by another Columbus native, Natalia Naman Temesgen, a writer and CSU English Department lecturer whose columns regularly grace the Ledger-Enquirer, and it is currently in its debut run at the Springer Opera House through April 8.
Temesgen, in a recent Ledger-Enquirer interview with Carrie Beth Wallace, talked about learning from the Springer’s Paul Pierce about the existence of Lloyd’s book, which she calls “probably the most thorough biography on Bullard.”
In addition to his military career, Bullard would own and manage Montmartre nightclubs, where, according to the New Georgia Encyclopedia, “he emerged as a leading personality among such African American entertainers as Josephine Baker, Louis Armstrong, and Sidney Bechet.” In the years leading up to World War II, he worked for French counterintelligence keeping tabs on Germans in Paris.
Temesgen compared this extraordinary soldier, aviator, boxer, entertainer, businessman, spy and, late in life, New York elevator operator to the principal characters in “Hidden Figures” — the critically acclaimed, Oscar-nominated (and mostly Georgia-filmed) 2016 movie about behind-the-scenes African-American women whose scientific and mathematical expertise was crucial to the U.S. space program.
“I like to use the phrase ‘hidden figure’ when talking about Eugene,” Temesgen said. “Because he is. We missed out on celebrating him while he was alive.”
True enough. But this centennial of the brutal war in which Bullard so courageously distinguished himself seems an especially appropriate time for his hometown to celebrate him now.
This story was originally published March 30, 2017 at 5:43 PM with the headline "Play celebrates a hometown hero."