BLACK HISTORY
From Corporal Eugene Bullard, the world’s first black combat aviator, Horace King, a former slave and master bridge builder, Ma Rainey, Mother of the Blues, to the Liberty Theatre, Black heritage is vital to sharing the full history of Columbus, Georgia.
​This page contains only a few stories highlighted along the Black History Trail.
Please click here for more information on individuals and sites included in the Black History Trail.
You can also visit the Tours page for even more Columbus history.
​​
​​​
PORTERDALE CEMETERY
​​
​According to the plan of the city of Columbus, Georgia in 1828, there were two lots of land laid out for the burial of “Slaves and Free Colored Persons.” The first lot used was between Sixth Avenue east to Eighth Avenue and 6th Street north to 7th Street. The other (Porterdale) was Sixth Avenue east to Tenth Avenue and 4th Street (Victory Drive) north to 5th Street. East Porterdale Cemetery is the overflow of West Porterdale Cemetery. The earliest marked burial in West Porterdale Cemetery reportedly dates from 1836.
In December of 1873, City Sexton Richard Lynah appointed Richard P. Porter to be Sexton of the Colored Cemetery. In the early 1900s, calls were being made for the closing of the Colored Cemetery and the establishment of a new colored cemetery. An excerpt from a 1909 city minutes reads: “It will be necessary during the coming year to secure some additional ground for the Negroes; the present Colored Cemetery being practically filled... There is a wedge-shaped plot of land located between the colored cemetery, the racetrack, and Tenth Avenue which could be very advantageously used as an addition to the colored cemetery.” After two weeks illness with uremia, Richard passed away at the age of 79 in his home on February 18, 1920. In 1936, the Colored Cemetery was renamed Porterdale in honor of Richard P. Porter. East Porterdale Cemetery was established in 1946.
​​
For information on notable individuals buried at both cemeteries, please click here. For a listing of veterans buried at both cemeteries, please click here.
​​​​
​
​
EUGENE BULLARD
​
Corporal Eugene Jacques Bullard (1894-1961) was the world's first Black aviator. He flew combat missions for France during World War I and received the Croix de Guerre, France's highest military decoration. Bullard was inducted into the Georgia Aviation Hall of Fame in 1989. A Columbus native, he attended the 28th Street School until the third grade. Bullard returned to live in New York City in 1940 and is buried in Brooklyn, NY.
​
Born in a three-room shotgun house on Talbotton Avenue in 1895, Eugene Bullard was destined for a life of adventure and achievement unprecedented by southern Black men of his time. Growing up in Columbus at the height of Jim Crow segregation, Eugene witnessed the near lynching of his father and rankled under the racial contempt that enclosed his life as a boy. When he was barely a teenager, he had had enough. He hit the road, hiding under a gypsy’s wagon in a field in East Highlands neighborhood on his first night away from home. Armed with only a third-grade education, Eugene stowed away on a merchant ship bound for Britain in 1912. He had already toured Europe as a successful prize fighter when World War I broke out in 1914. Gene enlisted in the French Foreign Legion – one of only a dozen African Americans serving in France – on his nineteenth birthday. For two bloody years, he endured the arduous life of a foot soldier on the Western Front.
​
In the spring of 1915, while Bullard manned a machine gun along the Somme River, his worried father wrote the U.S. State Department, asking for its help in returning his boy to him. There must have been a mistake, he wrote, since Eugene was too young to enlist. Mr. Bullard, then living on Sixth Avenue in Columbus, implored authorities to “have him freed at once” and sent home to his family. Even though U.S. Secretary of State Robert Lansing personally forwarded Bullard’s letter to the American embassy in Paris, Eugene had broken no French statute, and the matter went no farther.
​
By the following spring, Eugene had entered the deadly battle zone at Verdun where three hundred thousand soldiers would perish. Before the German assault even began, the Germans rained wo and a half million artillery shells over the French army in just twelve hours. For the next two weeks, Bullard’s unit was caught in a grinding war machine where “thousand upon thousand died… as earth was plowed under, and men and beasts hung from the branches of trees where they had been blown to pieces.” Going without sleep, Bullard gunned down scores of Germans with his machine gun, and when it jammed, fired his carbine at close range. He lost all but four of his teeth in an explosion that killed his mates. Three days later, as Bullard was taking a message from one French officer to another, a second exploding shell knocked him into a dugout with a gaping hole in his thigh, requiring three months’ recuperation in a Lyon hospital. For this wound, he received the esteemed Croix de Guerre with bronze star in 1916.
​
Although the Columbus native was too disabled to return to war as a foot soldier, Bullard decided to go into aviation next. A White southern friend of his in Paris told him, “You know there aren’t any Negroes in aviation.” Bullard replied, “That’s why I want to get into it.” And that is how Eugene Bullard became the first Black pilot in French aviation history. Although this accomplishment was noted in European newspapers, it was never mentioned in his native country. Yet, Bullard flew at least twenty missions against the Germans. He survived the Great War to become a nightclub owner in the Montmartre section of Paris. His patrons included Charlie Chaplin, Josephine Baker, Gloria Swanson, and the Prince of Wales. In World War II, Bullard re-enlisted and was wounded again. Afterward, he returned to his native land to live in New York. At some point, Bullard returned to Columbus to look up his family, but he found no trace of them. He died in New York in 1961.
​​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
GERTRUDE PRIDGETT "MA" RAINEY
​​
​
Among the many celebrities that have appeared on the stage of the Springer Opera House was a certain Columbus native who is more often than not remembered by her famous stage-name, “Ma” Rainey. Born in Columbus in 1886, young Gertrude Pridgett made her first public appearance at the turn-of-the-century before Springer patrons in a local talent show called “Bunch of Blackberries”. Within the next few years, she married a fellow performer, Will “Pa” Rainey, and they began touring the South, singing and dancing in black minstrel troupes on the Southern vaudeville circuit.
​
Because Ma Rainey’s “blues” style of singing was so original, she enjoyed success through most of the 1920s as a talent whose voice was immortalized on some ninety-four recordings that were sold around the country. As “Mother of the Blues”, Ma Rainey recorded alongside such “jazz” notables as Louis Armstrong and Tommy Dorsey.
​
After an impressive career on the road, Ma Rainey returned to her native Columbus in 1935, where she spent the last four years of her life. Gertrude Pridgett Rainey died at the age of fifty-three in 1939 and is buried in Columbus’s Porterdale Cemetery.
​
Playwright August Wilson’s “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” was a theatrical success on roadway in 1984 and was presented at Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre in 1991. The play is based on actual situations in which black artists like Ma Rainey found themselves working during the 1920s. Efforts to bring more attention to the artistic achievements of this great performer continue to be made in Columbus. A plaque, placed in her memory, hangs inside the Springer Opera House.
​
Her house, located at 805 Fifth Avenue, was nominated for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places in 1992. It was fully restored in 2006 and is now open to the public.
​
Please visit our Columbus History Exhibit page for more information on Ma Rainey. She is included in the Celebrate Columbus exhibit.
"BLIND TOM"
​
One of the most extraordinary personalities living in nineteenth century Columbus was a musical prodigy known as “Blind Tom." Born near Columbus (on the old Warm Springs Road) in 1849, Thomas Wiggins – later called Thomas G. Bethune – spent his childhood as a slave on the Columbus plantation of General James N. Bethune.
​
Blind at birth, “Blind Tom” was considered a “human mockingbird” capable of hearing an intricate musical composition and sitting down at the piano to reproduce what he had heard, often without making a single mistake. His expertise at the piano as a child was particularly amazing to those around him, since had been given no musical instruction of any kind.
​
Local historians believe that “Blind Tom” was only eight years old when he started performing before audiences in the Columbus area. As a young adult, during the Civil War, he toured Europe and is said to have performed before royalty. After the war, he performed in a number of American cities and even thrilled audiences at Columbus?s Springer Opera House.
​
Considered one of “the most amazing musical prodigies that has ever been known”, “Blind Tom” died in 1908 in Hoboken, New Jersey, where he had been living with a member of the Bethune family.
“Blind Tom” is believed to be buried in the old West family cemetery (a part of Westmoreland plantation) in Midland, Georgia.
A state historic marker stands nearby on Warm Springs Road, as a memorial to this exceptional talent.
​
Please visit our Columbus History Exhibit page for more information on Blind Tom. He is included in the Celebrate Columbus exhibit.
HORACE KING, MASTER BRIDGE BUILDER
​
Today, it is easy enough to cross the Chattahoochee River in order to go from Columbus to Phenix City; it is simply a matter of choosing the bridge that is most convenient for the traveler. However, bridges have not always spanned the Chattahoochee.
In 1832, a contract for construction of the first public bridge over the river, Dillingham Bridge, was given to a South Carolinian named John Godwin (b.1798-1859). When Godwin began building the bridge that same year, he had at his side a talented black man whose name would become one of the most celebrated in architectural history of East Alabama and West Central Georgia: Horace King.
King, a South Carolina native who was born into slavery in 1807, became known as a master builder of bridges and buildings in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi. His freedom from slavery was accomplished by Godwin’s petition submitted to the Alabama General Assembly in 1846. By the 1870s, King had built his famous “lattice bridges” over the Chattahoochee River (at West Point, Columbus, Ft. Gaines), the Flint River (at Albany), and the Oconee River (at Milledgeville). Before the end of his life, King was even known as a political figure, having served in the post-Civil War Alabama Legislature as a state representative from Russell County.
​
After John Godwin’s death in 1859, King erected a monument over his grave in the old Godwin cemetery in Phenix City that reads: “This stone was placed here by Horace King, in lasting remembrance of the love and gratitude he felt for his lost friend and former master.” In the 1870s, King moved to LaGrange, Georgia, where he and his sons prospered through the work of their construction firm. King died in 1887 and is buried in LaGrange’s Stonewall Cemetery.
​
Dr. William H. Green, an authority on the life and work of Horace King, has said of King: “Laborer and legislator, his life was an astonishing symbolic bridge – a bridge not only between states, but between men. Like one of his stately Town lattice bridges, Horace King's life soars above the murky waters historical limitations, of human bondage and racial prejudice. He did not change the currents of social history, but he did transcend them and stands as a reminder of our common humanity, the potential of human spirit, the power of human respect.”
​
Please visit our Columbus History Exhibit page for more information on Horace King. He is included in the Industrial Columbus exhibit.
ALMA WOODSEY THOMAS
​​
In 1890, Amelia and John Thomas moved to the Rose Hill neighborhood, an antebellum suburb of Columbus. They became the first known African American couple to own a home in the neighborhood. They lived at 411 21st Street on a small rise of land between wealthy White families at the top of the hill. The Thomas family would remain the only non-White family in the neighborhood for the next sixteen years.
​
Born on September 22, 1891, Alma was the eldest of Amelia and John’s four daughters. Her father was a businessman and worked in a church, while her mother was a dressmaker and homemaker. Her mother and aunts, Alma later wrote, were teachers and Tuskegee Institute graduates.  She was creative as a child, although her serious artistic career began much later in life.
​
In 1907, when Thomas was fifteen years old, her father moved the family to Washington, D.C. She enrolled in Howard University, and in 1924 became the first graduate of its newly formed art department. Thomas’s teacher and mentor, James V. Herring, granted her use of his private art library, from which she gained a thorough background in art history. A decade later, she earned a Master of Arts degree in education from Columbia University.
​
During the 1950s Thomas attended art classes at American University in Washington. She studied painting under Joe Summerford, Robert Gates, and Jacob Kainen, and developed an interest in color and abstract art. Throughout her teaching career she painted and exhibited academic still lifes and realistic paintings in group shows of African American artists.
​
​Alma Thomas began to paint seriously in 1960, when she retired from her thirty-eight-year career as an art teacher in the public schools of Washington, D.C. She would emerge as an exuberant colorist, abstracting shapes and patterns from the trees and flowers around her.
​
Thomas was in her eighth decade of life when she produced her most important works. The final years of her life brought awards and recognition. In 1972, she was honored with one-woman exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art and at the Corcoran Gallery of Art; that same year one of her paintings was selected for the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Before her death in 1978, Thomas had achieved national recognition as a major woman artist devoted to abstract painting.
​Please visit our Columbus History Exhibit page for more information on Alma Thomas. She is included in the Celebrate Columbus exhibit.
