Herbert Julian

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.