Eugene Bullard, the world’s first black fighter pilot who also received the Croix de Guerre, ran a series of successful Parisian 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 brick top, worked as a hostess who would later open her own celebrated nightclub. After the Nazi occupation of France, Bullard returned to the United States and died penniless and unsung.
But even three decades before the war, Philadelphia native Henry Ossawa Tanner moved to Paris and became an internationally acclaimed black artist. His painting “The Raising of Lazarus”, won a medal at the Paris Salon of 1897, was bought by the French government and once hung in the Musée D’Orsay. Tanner was made an honorary Chevalier or Knighthood of the Legion of Honour, France’s highest decoration, for his achievements.
For more than a century, many African Americans have marveled, as I do today, at the city’s warm reception and relative reprieve from racial animosity.
“I needed Paris,” wrote the photographer Gordon Parks in “Voices in the Mirror: An Autobiography.” “It was a celebration, a grand carnival of images, and immediately everything there seemed to sublimate those inner desires that have long been hampered by racism in America. For the first time in my life I relaxed from tension and pressure.”
I, too, enjoy this newfound status, even though I am saddened to recognize the extent to which African Americans are unaccustomed to it and therefore covet what others consider common courtesy. I am also reminded of the dangers of acceptance; how before George Floyd many white Americans seemed accustomed to the plight of black people and the many unarmed black boys and men all too often killed in encounters with police.
What should I think of this sudden reversal of roles in treatment as an African American in Paris? What is my responsibility to other black and brown people whose experiences are markedly different from my own? WEB Du Bois and other black leaders faced a similar conundrum when they met in Paris in 1919 for the Pan-African Congress and were advised to limit their criticism of injustice to racial oppression and lynchings in the United States so as not to overwhelm their host. to offend .
But history continually shows us that bigotry can only thrive when good people shut up and look away. So even those of us spared the sting of prejudice in Paris must speak out when it hurts others. We must not become blind to the injustice that we have long experienced at home.