Herbert
Julian (1897-1983), pilot and promoter. Julian was born in Port of
Spain, Trinidad, part of a prosperous family, and was educated in England and
Canada. While in Montreal he learned to fly an airplane, which had been
invented less than two decades earlier. Although pilots of African descent had
recently served in World War I for European countries, when Julian made a solo
flight in 1919 he became the first to do so in North America. He later wrote of
flying that “at the controls of a plane you feel free, complete master of your
own destiny for once, clear of all the petty restrictions and annoyances of the
world below…[this is] the one place where all men really are equal, where it
makes no difference what colour a man’s skin may happen to be, where all that
matters is your own skill.” Julian also invented a new parachute, but when he
traveled to Washington D.C. to file the patent, the office clerk refused to
believe that a black person could invent anything and said “What do you want to
file, music?” He then tried to register his patent in Canada under the name
“parachuttagravepresista,” but the authorities used the less flamboyant term “aeroplane
safety device.” Julian sold his invention for $25,000 and moved to New York,
arriving in a chauffeur-driven limousine. He was one of tens of thousands of
black people who came to New York from the South and the Caribbean during the
1910s and 1920s, making the Big Apple one of the world’s most prominent centers
of black culture, economics, and politics.
In 1923 Julian planned a parachute jump into
Harlem, placing signs around Harlem that read “Watch the clouds” and renting a
lot with the advertisement “Watch the clouds this Sunday – Julian is arriving
from the sky here.” In order to fund the jump he secured endorsements from
numerous black businesses, including a mortician who paid $100 for the right to
display his body if the parachute did not open. As his pilot flew over the
city, he exploded noise bombs to gain the attention of people in the streets
below, climbed onto the wing, and jumped off. Thousands of people chased after
him on the ground as he descended from the sky in a scarlet-colored “devil
costume,” opened a bag of flour to create a “dramatic long white trail,” unfurled
a banner advertising a local eye doctor, barely missed ramming into an elevated
train station, and landed on the roof of the post office. He was carried to the
nearby headquarters of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), an
organization founded by fellow West Indian migrant Marcus Garvey to promote
black economic and cultural independence. There Julian read advertisements for
his sponsors and encouraged the audience to support black businesses until he
was arrested for disorderly conduct. At his trial he passed out cards reading
“Hubert Julian, M.D., World’s Champion Daredevil Parachutist,” later explaining
that “M.D.” stood for “Mechanical Designer,” and was banned from flying over
New York for six months. Exactly six months later he made another jump, this
time while playing a gold-plated saxophone produced by one of his new sponsors.
In the decade of the “Roaring Twenties” when celebrities were achieving unprecedented
fame and the term “Harlem Renaissance” came to symbolize a flowering of northern
black cultural expression, Julian’s jumps made him one of the most famous
African Americans in the country and a symbol of the country’s most prominent
black community. As historians Shane White, Stephen Garton, Stephen Robertson,
and Graham White wrote of him: “Julian’s embrace of modernity, his love of
speed and the machine, even the way he exploited, to a quite remarkable extent,
the new art of advertising, all seemed to usher in a new age for African
Americans, one full of possibilities.” White newspapers initially mocked him as
the “Ace of Spades,” but a black writer gave him the nickname “The Black Eagle
of Harlem.” This title became so widely known that for decades the post office
delivered to his home letters addressed “The Black Eagle, U.S.A.”
In 1924 Julian announced that he would make a 4,600-mile
solo flight from New York to Liberia. Several white pilots had already made
transatlantic flights, but none had flown solo, and all had taken the much
shorter trip between North America and Europe. Julian would be the first pilot
to make the trip alone and the first one of color to do it at all, and his
destination was also symbolically important to people of African descent as one
of only two African countries that was not under European colonial rule. He
purchased an old plane, named it Ethiopia I in honor of the only other independent nation in Africa, and painted on
its side “Dedicated to the advancement of the Negro race.” In order to finance
his flight he started a fundraising drive in black newspapers asking each
reader to donate one dollar for this “scientific undertaking” and charged
admission to see “the mighty Ethiopia I that
I am going to attempt to fly to Africa, land of our fathers.” On Independence
Day, 30,000 people crowded the streets and shores of Harlem to watch the flight.
Unfortunately, the plane crashed into the sea due to mechanical failure after traveling
only 1,500 feet and Julian suffered a broken leg. His plans for future transatlantic
flights fell through due to a lack of funding, but he made shorter flights and
parachute jumps throughout the United States. During the 1927 funeral procession
of entertainer Florence Mills, he dropped rose petals on the 200,000 mourners.
He also appeared at UNIA events, at gatherings of the religious leader Father
Divine, and with an all-black flying group called The Five Blackbirds. He later
stated that “though you may think that parachute jumps over Harlem were a strange
way of working for racial advancement, I honestly believe it really did
contribute something useful and valuable.” In 1930 he was invited to Ethiopia
for the coronation of Emperor Haile Selassie, and during the ceremony he parachuted
to within fifty feet of the throne. When Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935, Julian
helped to train more than 3,000 troops in defense of the country but then
returned to Harlem when the resistance failed. During World War II he worked
with the air force of Finland and challenged Herman Göring, a top German
official and former fighter pilot, to a plane duel in order to avenge the
Nazi’s “cowardly insult to the honor of my race.” He also worked with Oscar
Micheaux, one of the only black filmmakers of the time, on the 1940 film The Notorious Elinor Lee. They planned a
film about Julian’s life, but the funding fell through; Hollywood would not
make a biopic about an African American until the early 1950s. All of this
generated a huge amount of publicly, as did his expensive wardrobe, which
included a monocle, walking stick, and silk umbrella. One writer called him “a
publicist without peer.”
After World War II Julian founded
the import-export business Black Eagle Associates. When the company began
selling weapons in war-torn regions around the world, Julian became wealthy,
but his international reputation was permanently tarnished. When he was
arrested in the Congo in 1962, a Ghanaian working for the United Nations told
him “This is one of the saddest days of my life. When I was an undergraduate, I
worshipped you as a hero. Most of my African contemporaries did the same.” He
was released but banned from returning to the Congo. He remained in the public
eye by appearing on television talk shows, writing the autobiography Black Eagle in 1965, attending a
Muhammad Ali fight in London in 1966, and telling Jet Magazine in 1974 that he was, at the age of 77, planning a
rescue of the recently-deposed Emperor Selassie. Herbert Julian died in New
York in 1983. In Toni Morrison’s 1992 novel Jazz,
which is set in Harlem during the 1920s, one of the first lines reads “A
colored man floats down out of the sky blowing a saxophone,” and in 2017 his
story was told anew in the documentary The Black Eagle of Harlem. His efforts as one of the first black pilots helped
pave the way for later aviators like Bessie Coleman, the Tuskegee Airmen, and Ronald
McNair, and while Muhammad Ali, Billy Porter, and others carried on his
tradition of combining self-promotion with international racial uplift and
economic empowerment.
©David Brodnax, Sr.
