A Catholic priest blesses Jerusalem with Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament from the Garden of Gethsemane on the Feast of Corpus Christi.
Video: Christian Media Center
When the President of France visited the United States in April 1960, he asked the FBI to help him find a man.
The man he was looking for was an American citizen. He was sixty-four years old. He had been awarded fifteen French military decorations and — six months earlier, in a ceremony in Paris — had been made a Knight of the Légion d'honneur, the highest civilian honor France can give. The medal had been pinned to his chest by the President himself, who had publicly called him un véritable héros français. A true French hero.
The FBI located the man within a few days.
He was operating an elevator at Rockefeller Center in New York City.
The elevator operator's name was Eugene Bullard. He had been born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1895, the son of a man whose own father had been a slave.
He had run away from Columbus at the age of eleven, after watching a white mob nearly lynch his father.
He spent the next several years drifting through the American South. At sixteen, he stowed away on a German freighter at Norfolk, Virginia. He landed in Aberdeen, Scotland. From there he made his way to London, where he learned to box. By 1913, at eighteen, he was prizefighting in Paris.
When Germany invaded France in August 1914, Bullard was nineteen years old. He had no legal obligation to fight. He had no French citizenship.
He went to the recruiting office on October 19, 1914, and signed up for the French Foreign Legion.
He spent the next eighteen months as an infantryman in some of the worst fighting of the war — at the Somme, at Champagne, at Verdun. He was wounded three times. The third wound, on March 5, 1916, tore open his thigh and left him with permanent damage to his leg.
He was twenty years old. The doctors told him he would not return to the infantry.
He decided he wanted to fly.
In a Paris café in the spring of 1916, while he was recovering, Bullard mentioned to three white American friends that he was thinking of joining the French air service. A Mississippian named Jeff Dickson laughed.
Gene, Dickson said, you know damn well there aren't any Negroes in aviation.
Bullard answered: Sure do. That's why I want to get into it. There has to be a first to everything, and I'm going to be the first.
Dickson bet him two thousand dollars he would not make it.
Bullard took the bet. He earned his pilot's license on May 5, 1917. He won the bet.
He reported to the front in August 1917 and flew approximately twenty combat missions over the next three months in a SPAD VII. The fuselage was painted with a bleeding heart pierced by a knife and the French phrase Tout le Sang qui Coule est Rouge — All Blood that Flows is Red.
He carried, on every combat flight, a small capuchin monkey named Jimmy in the front of his flight jacket.
The French press began calling him L'Hirondelle Noire — the Black Swallow.
When the United States entered the war in 1917, Bullard immediately applied to transfer to the U.S. Army Air Service.
His application was rejected.
The U.S. Army Air Service had a policy, in 1917, of not accepting Black pilots. The other American pilots flying for France in his unit, all of them white, were transferred to the U.S. Air Service.
He was the only one who was not.
For the next twenty years, he was one of the most familiar faces in the Montmartre nightlife of Paris between the wars. He owned a nightclub called L'Escadrille. He spoke fluent French, English, and German. Hemingway drank there. Fitzgerald drank there. Langston Hughes drank there. Josephine Baker performed there. Louis Armstrong was a personal friend.
When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Bullard was forty-four. His fluent German and his ownership of a nightclub frequented by German officers made him useful to the French Resistance. He became an intelligence agent — eavesdropping in his own bar on conversations between German officers who did not know he understood every word.
When France fell in June 1940, friends in the Resistance smuggled him across the Spanish border before the Gestapo could arrest him.
He came back to the United States for the first time in twenty-eight years.
He arrived in New York with thirty dollars in his pocket and a permanent limp.
He did not return to a hero's welcome. He returned to a country that had no idea who he was.
He worked at a perfume counter. He worked as a security guard. He worked at the Staten Island shipyards. By the late 1940s, he had taken the job that he would hold for most of the rest of his life.
He operated the elevator at Rockefeller Center.
He was wearing the elevator uniform on the day a producer from NBC came down from the studios upstairs to ask if he was the man Charles de Gaulle had been looking for.
A few weeks later, NBC sent a film crew to interview him in the lobby. The studios where NBC produced The Today Show were on the floors above. He had operated the elevator that took the network executives up to those studios every morning for nearly ten years. He had not been recognized as he did it.
He went back to operating the elevator the following Monday.
He died of stomach cancer on October 12, 1961, three days after his sixty-sixth birthday.
He was buried in the French War Veterans' section of Flushing Cemetery, in Queens, in the uniform of the French Foreign Legion. The casket was draped with the French flag.
In 1994 — thirty-three years after his death — the United States Air Force formally commissioned Eugene Jacques Bullard as a Second Lieutenant, posthumously.
It was the first commission the U.S. military had ever offered him.
He had been the first Black combat pilot in American history.
The French had been calling him a hero since 1917.
The Americans got around to it in 1994.
Paris (XVIIe) : deux policiers blessés, dont l'un sérieusement, lors d'une interpellation ; le suspect, qui avait arraché le collier en or d'une femme, a été remis en liberté avec une convocation, malgré son OQTF https://t.co/iolph8iitc
Face au nombre, au nombre, au nombre...
Une seule réponse :
DE L'ORDRE, DE L'ORDRE, DE L'ORDRE !
🇨🇵 ZEMMOUR DEBOUT, JUSQU'AU BOUT ! 🇨🇵
#remigration#Zemmour2027
María, 25 años, acaba de luchar contra el cáncer y espera sus últimos resultados médicos definitivos.
Ha salido hoy a las calles de Madrid solo para ver pasar al Papa León XIV.
Su deseo: “Que los jóvenes vean que la fe no se ha perdido, que la juventud sigue con Dios”.
Recemos por María y por esos resultados médicos que espera.
Grands oubliés du jour le plus long, les valeureux soldats canadiens qui débarquèrent sur la plage Juno le 6 juin 1944.
Émouvante cérémonie de commémoration 🇫🇷🇨🇦
Porté par un excellent bouche-à-oreille, «L’Abandon» de Vincent Garenq, film choc sur l’affaire Paty, s’apprête à dépasser la barre des 500 000 entrées
Un «phénomène de société» ?
➡️ https://t.co/BjnY9SApHZ
🚨⛪ 𝗔𝗟𝗘𝗥𝗧𝗘 𝗜𝗡𝗙𝗢 — Lors d’un office célébré vendredi soir dans l’église Saint-Louis de Beauregard, à Poissy dans les Yvelines, deux personnes ont INSULTÉ les fidèles présents, en proférant notamment les phrases :
• « Nique ta mère les chrétiens ! »
• « Allah Akbar ».
La municipalité ne s’est PAS EXPRIMÉE publiquement sur ces propos, dans le contexte de sa politique de « bien-vivre ensemble » mise en place à travers des rencontres interconfessionnelles depuis 2014. (FB : Génération Poissy)
Lo que ha ocurrido en Madrid es impresionante
🔴El Papa León con el Santísimo
🔴Los reyes arrodillados ante Cristo
🔴Más de un millón de personas adorando a Dios
🔴Familias volcada en la calle creyendo en la eucaristía
España nunca te acabes.
El mundo te necesita
Du coup, vu que Mathieu Pigasse est candidat à la présidentielle..
L service public va arrêter de diffuser les émissions politiques qu'il produit (cdanslair, cpolitique,ccesoir)?!
Non parce que ça fait un petit conflit d'intérêts quand même?! 🤔
Poissy (78) : un office catholique perturbé au cri de « Nique ta mère les chrétiens ! Allah Akbar ! », la ville interpellée sur son absence de condamnation. https://t.co/4C2IFgxVTn
🚨 🇪🇸
Actor Antonio Banderas in front of Pope Leo XIV today in Madrid
Banderas praised the Catholic Church for its contribution to art and beauty and spoke about his own love for Holy Week processions