Hector Bullard (abt. 1887 - aft. 1906)

Born about Sep 1887 in Columbus, Muskogee, Georgia, United States

Died after 1906 after about age 18 in Georgia, United States [uncertain]

Biography

Hector Bullard is a part of US Black heritage.

Hector was born about 1887. He is the son of William Bullard and Josephine Thomas

"As Eugene Bullard was on his way to fame and fortune abroad, his older brother Hector was lynched in Georgia"...... Eugene’s father found a new job far from trouble. He started working on the railroad outside of Columbus, going away for long stretches. The family began to split up. Eugene’s older sister, Pauline, the one who stepped up to take care of the younger children after their mother died, married and moved to Alabama. Eugene ran away from home, aiming for France, where he believed he could be free of discrimination. His father had planted the seed with rosy stories about that country. Eugene quit the South before the Great Migration, when millions of blacks fled North, bringing their dreams and much of the South’s potential with them. When he ran away, his older brother Hector was studying business administration at Morris Brown College, a historically black college in Atlanta. Hector was preparing to run a peach farm in Fort Valley, one of the biggest in the region. He inherited it from his mother, who inherited it from her mother. A white family — Eugene identifies them in his autobiography only by the first initial of their last name, “W” — had cultivated the farm for years, serving as overseers. The overseers would send Hector’s family money every year but without any accounting of how the farm was performing overall. Eugene writes: “The W. who ran it when Hector inherited it could not understand why he should not run the orchard to suit himself the way his father and grandfather had. But Hector was determined to manage his own property and was studying to do it right. Years later his attempt to win control of it got him lynched.” Short and direct, that last sentence lands like one of Eugene’s left jabs. With it, Eugene punches his older brother’s fate into history and leaves some clues about what happened to Hector...a Columbus city directory confirmed he [Hector] was there in 1906. It identifies Hector as a porter living with his brother Ben, a laborer.....documents showing Hector married Sallie Umphrey in Muscogee County in 1906, when he would have been about 19.......could not find either of them in census records after 1900. Nor could we find a World War I draft card for Hector. And he does not appear in Georgia death records"^[1]

1 June 1900: 772 G. M District, Muscogee Co., Georgia;^[2]

Married 16 years, 9 children, 6 living;

Occupation of William: Teamster;

William Bullard Head of Household 37 Georgia/South Carolina/South Carolina;

Josie Bullard Wife 35 Georgia/Georgia/Georgia;

Pauline Bullard Dau 15 Georgia;

Hector Bullard Son 13 Georgia;

Ben Bullard Son 11 Georgia;

Eugene Bullard Son 5 Georgia;

Joe Bullard Son 3 Georgia;

Arthur Bullard Son 1 Georgia;

Sources

1. ↑ "The Vanishing Stories of the Bullard Brothers" (The Bitter Southerner: online database)
2. ↑ https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:M3JR-CPZ