TheWashingtonPotomacs

DC native, Christian, sports fan, cosplay junkie, energy-spreader.

[Maryland Men’s Basketball @TerrapinHoops]

50 years ago today: John Lucas was selected with the No. 1 overall pick in the 1976 NBA Draft by the Houston Rockets.

🏀 2x First Team All-American
🏀 3x First Team All-ACC
🏀 1976 ACC Athlete of the Year

[TheWashingtonPotomacs @StewartSmall20]

@brett02e @MattieJohns14 @BlackMediaHub People ignore Zimmerman’s role in this and just expected Martin to not do anything when he felt threatened.

[TheWashingtonPotomacs @StewartSmall20]

@brett02e @MattieJohns14 @BlackMediaHub First of all, as the cousin of a special needs individual, your use of the r-word is offensive. Secondly, if he was being followed and was unfairly confronted, he has the right to defend himself.

[TheWashingtonPotomacs @StewartSmall20]

@gizmosmom1212 @UFLDefenders @Instegone Yes, they are.

[TheWashingtonPotomacs @StewartSmall20]

@KwikWarren No lies detected!

[Scott Abraham @Scott7news]

Eight years ago today was one of the greatest days in D.C. sports history.

I would argue this is the best Cup raise of all time.

The emotion, disbelief and the primal scream from Alex Ovechkin is something Caps fans will never forget.

I still get goosebumps watching it.

[TheWashingtonPotomacs @StewartSmall20]

@MattyFreshTV Sometimes it's fine to be called an underdog. It makes you play with a chip on your shoulder.

[SKI @skiistiredasf]

The Divine 9 were straight off the chain at Bethune-Cookman University’s graduation! 🔥🙌🏾
From powerful steps to proud strolls, they showed out big for the Class of 2026. Pure HBCU magic and Black excellence on full display.
Y’all did that, Wildcats! 👏🏾👏🏾

[TheWashingtonPotomacs @StewartSmall20]

@_iamlougotti John Riggins

[TheWashingtonPotomacs @StewartSmall20]

@WashMystics @ChasenBoscolo That's my kind of list.

[Mr. Christopher @iamalmostlegend]

Someone called 911 on two young brothers selling lemonade at their lemonade at their lemonade stand. The Police and Fire Department showed up.

Watch what happened next:

[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.

[TheWashingtonPotomacs @StewartSmall20]

@_nataliespala

[TheWashingtonPotomacs @StewartSmall20]

@SleeperNFL @SleeperTitanUp @SleeperWSH @RiseUpReader @TitansLeadSM @CommandersLead @FalconsLeadSM @JayDanielsMVP I'd give it to the Commanders if they had included gold pants with the burgundy jerseys.

[TheWashingtonPotomacs @StewartSmall20]

@brett02e @MattieJohns14 @BlackMediaHub If the operator told him not to confront the kid and he did, then it IS relevant. It was Zimmerman who confronted him. Martin had the right to try to defend himself. None of this happens if Zimmerman stands down.

[TheWashingtonPotomacs @StewartSmall20]

Contemplating the sacred domain of @Bridoll24x

[TheWashingtonPotomacs @StewartSmall20]

@brett02e @MattieJohns14 @BlackMediaHub The operator told Zimmerman not to confront the kid. When he did, Trayvon had to defend himself. Zimmerman was trying to play Supercop. That's why all of that started.

[Don Salmon @dijoni]

It is black music month so enjoy the music.

[TheWashingtonPotomacs @StewartSmall20]

@doriancraft We're happy to have you here. Keep up the great work!

[TheWashingtonPotomacs @StewartSmall20]

Loving the job that @doriancraft is doing on Mystics games!