What Paris means to Black Americans
Written by Black Hot Fire Network on December 10, 2022
Eugene Bullard, the world’s first Black fighter pilot who was also awarded the Croix de Guerre, ran a series of successful Paris nightclubs in the 1920s and 1930s, most notably Le Grand Duc where Langston Hughes worked as a busboy and where Ada Smith, the performer known as Bricktop, worked as a hostess who would later open her own celebrated nightclub. Following the Nazi occupation of France, Bullard returned to the United States and died penniless and unsung.
But even three decades before the war, the Philadelphia native . . .
