Hubert Julian

Hubert Fauntleroy Julian was born on the twentieth of September 1897 at Port of Spain, Trinidad, the only son of Henry Bain Julian — a manager of a cocoa plantation at the Maraval valley on the north of the island — and Lillian Hilton Julian. The household was Trinidadian Anglican middle-class of the late colonial period.

He was placed at six at the Tranquillity Boys’ School at Port of Spain and at sixteen at the Eastbourne College at Sussex, England, from 1913 to 1916. He was at Eastbourne at the time of the outbreak of the European war of August 1914 and was given a pilot’s introductory course at the Royal Flying Corps reserve squadron at Hendon at the close of the Eastbourne years.

He was admitted in 1916 at nineteen to the Royal Canadian Air Force reserve flight programme at Camp Borden, Ontario — having moved to Canada in 1914 — and completed the basic pilot training there in 1917. He was at the close of the war in November 1918 a serving pilot of the Royal Canadian Air Force reserve.

He relocated to New York in 1921 at twenty-three and undertook the close of the 1920s the principal Black aviation publicity of inter-war Harlem. He was the first man of any race to conduct a parachute jump over the city of New York — at the corner of 138th Street and Lenox Avenue at Harlem on the twenty-ninth of April 1923 — under a Marcus Garvey (placed in this archive) Universal Negro Improvement Association sponsorship.

He undertook in August 1924 a single-pilot transatlantic flight attempt — from the Harlem River seaplane base at 138th Street to West Africa — in a Boeing Model 8 Mongoose seaplane named the Ethiopia I. The aircraft ditched five minutes after take-off in the Harlem River at 138th Street, the entire flight visible from the rooftops of Harlem; Julian was unhurt and the aircraft was salvaged. He never made a second transatlantic attempt.

He was the principal aviator of the public Harlem of the inter-war period — appearing at hundreds of Black aviation publicity events under the press epithet ‘the Black Eagle of Harlem’ between 1923 and 1939.

He was named in 1930 by Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia — at the Emperor’s 1930 coronation at Addis Ababa, which Julian attended in a Harlem-Trinidadian commemorative-publication assignment — a colonel of the Imperial Ethiopian Air Force and the personal pilot of the Emperor. He served the Ethiopian Air Force across two appointments from 1930 to 1931 and from 1935 to 1936 — including the period of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia of October 1935. He returned to New York at the Italian conquest of Addis Ababa in May 1936.

He served the United States Air Service in the Second World War as a civilian arms procurement intermediary and lived the post-war career at the Bronx as an arms broker — operating between governments of the post-colonial period.

He died at New York on the nineteenth of February 1983 of complications of cancer, at eighty-five.

He is honored here as the Black Eagle of Harlem.