Keith Byer

I go from Jackass to Asshole Man with 2 cups of HENNY

[Historical Africa @historical_Afr]

I thought it would be nice to see Emmett Till in another light...(pictured on the left) 🕊

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

This man escaped slavery by stealing a Confederate warship… Then became its captain.

[Keith Byer @Mafia_Demon]

@BreeNewsome @Taurus_Groove I’d wipe my ass with it

[Keith Byer @Mafia_Demon]

@LongTimeHistory TSA worker is an idiot, no reason it took that long and he kept going over the same spots, mind u the guy has shorts on. Fucking clown show

[Keith Byer @Mafia_Demon]

@mister_nbd @Footballogue Complicated is the new word for “Shit Show”?

[Crazy Vibes @CrazyVibes_1]

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.

[Brother Legend @BigBroLGND]

Duh!! A Black man is not hanging himself in a Mississippi tree 🤦🏾‍♂️

[‏ً @omgsidewalks]

can someone PLEASE explain to me why it's always “if you can't pay rent, buy fewer lattes and avocado toasts” and not “if you can't pay your employees a living wage, buy fewer yachts and real estate”

i am BEGGING someone to explain to me like i'm in kindergarten.

[Keith Byer @Mafia_Demon]

@rustyrogers3 @NeverteIImeodd Yes that is still a woman 🤷🏾‍♂️

[Nora @Heal_within96]

Africa is underdeveloped because:

1) Every nationalistic leader was murdered, and the current leaders are obedient puppets to the Western hegemonies.

2) Western companies continue to steal resources.

3) They continue to fund coups/instabilities, preventing any chance of peace, which would have instigated development.

[Keith Byer @Mafia_Demon]

@Andie00471 His ass causes too much confusion and anxiety and the Knicks lose and that “fake attempt” might be the realest one ever!

[Keith Byer @Mafia_Demon]

@dayaoiwizard @AdamantxYves He’s being held in federal custody within NYC, Mamdani can’t do anything about it.

[Keith Byer @Mafia_Demon]

@MakeupFaded @Tmills774 @GigglingGanon Lmao in what world does a supervisor fire a LEO? He would sit in the station for hours because the idiot cops were too brazen to read and too dumb to ask the right questions!

[Keith Byer @Mafia_Demon]

@ReddCinema Who the fuck is he to say what he wants to cut? Hes rich great but hes a private citizen nothing more 🙄🙄

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

A ceremony repeated every year on this day in France: sand of Omaha Beach brings forward from the brightness of the stone the names of the fallen, 82 years ago Today

[📹 Jackie Speier]

[Keith Byer @Mafia_Demon]

@SheaSerrano Boo? This NY they might have to stop the game with the amount of garbage that’s gonna be thrown at him!