Hubert Julian

Hubert Fauntleroy Julian was born on the twentieth of September 1897 at Port of Spain, Trinidad, the only son of Henry Julian, a manager of a cocoa plantation at Toco on the northeast of the island. Raised in comfort and educated with care, the young Julian left the Caribbean for England and then Canada, where in 1920 he took his first flight with the Canadian ace Billy Bishop and fixed his life upon the air.

In 1921 he made his way to Harlem, and there — amid the ferment of the New Negro era and Marcus Garvey's movement — he became a public marvel. Parachuting over the rooftops in a crimson jumpsuit, once descending while playing a saxophone, he earned the name that followed him ever after: the Black Eagle of Harlem. He announced bold transatlantic attempts that captured the imagination of Black America, embodying the audacious claim that the sky belonged to him as much as to any man.

His destiny turned toward Africa when Emperor Haile Selassie prepared for his coronation. Julian traveled to Ethiopia, was granted Ethiopian citizenship, raised to the rank of colonel, and honored with the Order of Menelik. When Fascist Italy invaded in 1935, he was associated with the tiny Imperial Ethiopian Air Force — a handful of aircraft standing against an empire — a symbol of the diaspora's solidarity with the last uncolonized African throne.

For six decades his name blazed across headlines on three continents, a Trinidad-born son of the Caribbean who insisted, against every barrier of his age, that a Black man could command the heavens. He died in New York in 1983. We honor Hubert Julian — the Black Eagle — who lifted the pride of a people into the sky and never once let it fall.