Bessie Coleman

Bessie Coleman was born on January 26, 1892, in a one-room wooden cabin in Atlanta, Texas, to George Coleman, who was of African American and Cherokee descent, and Susan Coleman, a formerly enslaved woman. She was the tenth of thirteen children. When she was two years old the family moved ninety miles south to Waxahachie, Texas, where her parents worked on rented farmland and picked cotton. Her father left the family around 1901 to return to Indian Territory, now Oklahoma; her mother stayed and raised the children on her own.

She walked four miles each way to a segregated one-room school. Her teachers recognized her quickness with arithmetic. She finished the school's eight-grade curriculum and, at eighteen, used her own savings from picking cotton and taking in washing to enroll at the Colored Agricultural and Normal University in Langston, Oklahoma, now Langston University. Her money ran out after one term and she went home.

In 1915 she followed two of her brothers to Chicago and took a job as a manicurist at the White Sox Barber Shop on State Street, at the center of the neighborhood that was becoming the Black Belt during the Great Migration. Two of her brothers served in France during the First World War. When they came home, John teased her by saying that French women were allowed to fly airplanes but she never would. She took the taunt as an instruction.

She wrote to every flight school she could find in the United States. Every one refused her, some because she was Black, some because she was a woman, most because she was both. Robert Abbott, the publisher of the Chicago Defender, told her that if she wanted to fly, she would have to leave the country. He and Jesse Binga, the founder of the first Black-owned bank in Chicago, agreed to sponsor her.

She enrolled in a Berlitz French class and paid for the lessons out of her manicurist wages. In November 1920 she sailed to France. She trained at the Caudron Brothers School of Aviation in Le Crotoy, on the Somme coast, where she flew a Nieuport Type 82 biplane. On June 15, 1921, she received a pilot's license from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale. She was the first Black woman in the history of flight to hold a license of any kind, and the first Black person of any gender to hold an international license.

She returned to New York in September 1921 as a public figure. American flight schools had not changed. She went back to Europe in 1922, trained in France and in the Netherlands with Anthony Fokker's company, and came home as a barnstormer, which was the job of flying aerobatics in front of paying audiences at county fairs and open fields across the country. Her first American public flight was on September 3, 1922, at Glenn Curtiss Field on Long Island. She was billed as "the world's greatest woman flier."

She refused to perform at airshows that segregated their crowds. In Waxahachie, the town where she had grown up, she told the organizers that she would not fly unless Black and white spectators entered the same gate. They agreed. She still kept separate stands; she had pushed what she could push on the day.

She toured the country giving lectures at Black churches, schools, and theaters, often showing films of her flights. She saved money with a single goal. She intended to open a flight school for Black Americans, because she had learned how much further a Black pilot could go if someone in America would teach them.

On April 30, 1926, she was at Paxon Field outside Jacksonville, Florida, rehearsing an aerial performance scheduled for the next day. Her mechanic, William D. Wills, was flying the Curtiss JN-4 "Jenny" aircraft while she scouted the field from the passenger seat, unbuckled so she could lean over the side to choose her parachute jump point. A wrench that had been left in the engine compartment during repairs slipped into the control gears. The airplane entered an uncontrollable dive at about three thousand feet. She was thrown from the aircraft and killed. Wills died in the crash that followed. She was thirty-four years old.

Ten thousand people attended her funeral in Chicago. Ida B. Wells-Barnett delivered one of the eulogies. Her flight school was never built in her lifetime, but the Bessie Coleman Aero Club, founded by William Powell in Los Angeles in 1929, carried her goal forward. In 1977 a group of Black women pilots founded the Bessie Coleman Aviators Club to keep her name and her work circulating among the aviators she had been trying to create.