Bessie Coleman

Bessie Coleman was born on January 26, 1892, in Atlanta, Texas, one of thirteen children of George Coleman, a sharecropper of African American and Cherokee ancestry, and Susan Coleman, an African American domestic worker ^[1]. The family soon moved to Waxahachie, a cotton town south of Dallas, where Bessie walked several miles to a one-room segregated school and helped harvest cotton each season. When she was about nine, her father left for Oklahoma's Indian Territory, hoping to escape Texas's racial restrictions; Susan stayed behind and raised the children alone ^[2].

Coleman was an able student, particularly in mathematics, and she saved laundry earnings to enroll at the Colored Agricultural and Normal University in Langston, Oklahoma. Her money ran out after a single term, and she returned to Waxahachie ^[1]. Around 1915 she joined the Great Migration north, settling in Chicago with two of her brothers. There she trained as a manicurist and worked in a barbershop on the South Side, at the edge of the neighborhood's lively Stroll district ^[3].

Chicago changed her horizons. Her brother John, back from service in France during the First World War, teased her that French women could do something she never would: fly airplanes. The taunt stuck. Coleman began asking American flight schools for admission and discovered that none would train a Black woman ^[2].

Rejection at home pushed Coleman toward an unusual plan. Robert S. Abbott, publisher of the Chicago Defender, one of the country's most influential Black newspapers, encouraged her to train in France, where licensing did not depend on race. She took a better-paying job managing a chili parlor, studied French at night school, and gathered financial backing that included support from Abbott and the banker Jesse Binga ^[3].

In November 1920 Coleman sailed for France. She enrolled at the Ecole d'Aviation des Freres Caudron at Le Crotoy in the Somme, completing a course that normally ran longer in about seven months, and learned to fly in a Nieuport biplane with a rudimentary steering system ^[1]. On June 15, 1921, the Federation Aeronautique Internationale granted her a pilot's license, making her the first African American woman and the first woman of Native American descent to hold an international aviation credential ^[4].

Who was Bessie Coleman at that moment? A 29-year-old former manicurist holding a qualification no American school would let her earn. When she landed in New York in September 1921, Black newspapers celebrated her return, and the Air Service journal Aerial Age Weekly took note of her achievement ^[2]. Realizing that exhibition flying demanded skills beyond a basic license, she went back to Europe in 1922 for advanced instruction in France, the Netherlands, and Germany, where she reportedly trained with pilots connected to the Fokker company ^[3].

Coleman's public flying career opened on September 3, 1922, with an air show at Curtiss Field on Long Island, an event billed by the Chicago Defender as the first public flight by a Black woman in the United States ^[3]. Six weeks later she performed before a home crowd at Checkerboard Airdrome near Chicago. Audiences came to see loops, figure eights, and daring low passes, and the press soon called her Queen Bess ^[1].

Among the most striking Bessie Coleman achievements was her refusal to accept segregation as the price of celebrity. She declined to perform unless Black spectators could enter through the same gates as white ones, and she walked away from a film role in 1922 when the script required her to appear in ragged clothing she considered demeaning to Black women ^[2]. Barnstorming was her livelihood, but she treated every show as an argument that aviation belonged to everyone.

Her larger ambition was institutional. Coleman lectured in Black churches, schools, and theaters across the country, showing films of her flights and urging young African Americans to enter aviation. She spoke openly of founding a flight school for Black students, a goal she pursued through paid appearances and a beauty shop she opened in Orlando to raise money ^[4]. The school never opened in her lifetime, yet the idea outlived her: William J. Powell established the Bessie Coleman Aero Club in Los Angeles in 1929, an early institutional home for Black pilots ^[5].

Coleman guarded her private life, and parts of it surfaced only through later research. In 1917 in Chicago she married Claude Glenn, a man considerably older than she was; the marriage was kept quiet even from much of her family, and the couple never lived together for long ^[2]. She had no children.

She cultivated a vivid public persona instead, appearing at shows in a tailored military-style uniform with polished boots and a Sam Browne belt. Interviewers found her quick, confident, and unbending on matters of dignity ^[1]. Any Bessie Coleman biography has to reckon with how deliberately she managed her image: she understood that a Black woman in a cockpit was itself a public statement, and she dressed and spoke for the role.

Her career carried real physical cost. In February 1923 her plane's motor stalled shortly after takeoff in Santa Monica, California, and the crash left her with a broken leg, cracked ribs, and cuts. From her hospital bed she sent word through the press that she would fly again, and within two years she had rebuilt her exhibition schedule with appearances in Texas and across the South ^[3].

By 1925 and 1926 Coleman was piecing together the money for her school through lectures, exhibition contracts, and parachute jumps. She flew borrowed or aging aircraft because she could not always afford her own, a compromise that pilots of the era knew carried danger ^[2]. Early in 1926 she arranged to buy a Curtiss JN-4, the war-surplus trainer known as the Jenny, which her mechanic and publicity agent William D. Wills flew from Texas to Florida, making forced landings along the way because of engine trouble ^[1].

On April 30, 1926, Coleman and Wills took the Jenny up over Jacksonville, Florida, to scout the field for a May Day exhibition sponsored by the local Negro Welfare League. Wills piloted while Coleman, unbelted so she could lean out and study the terrain for a planned parachute jump, rode in the other cockpit. At roughly 3,000 feet the aircraft suddenly dove and flipped, throwing Coleman out; she fell to her death, and Wills died when the plane crashed and burned ^[4]. Investigators found that a loose wrench had slid into the control gears and jammed them ^[3].

Coleman was 34. Thousands attended memorial services in Jacksonville and Orlando, and an estimated ten thousand mourners filed past her casket in Chicago, where the activist and journalist Ida B. Wells took part in the funeral rites. She was buried at Lincoln Cemetery in the Chicago area ^[5].

Coleman's influence widened after her death. Black flying clubs adopted her name, and beginning in 1931 pilots associated with Chicago's Challenger Air Pilots Association began a tradition of flying over Lincoln Cemetery to drop flowers on her grave ^[5]. The generation she inspired included the founders of the flight programs that helped prepare the ground for the Tuskegee Airmen of the Second World War, and later pilots such as Mae Jemison, the first Black woman in space, cited her example. Jemison carried a photograph of Coleman aboard the shuttle Endeavour in 1992 ^[4].

Public honors accumulated steadily. Chicago renamed a road at O'Hare International Airport Bessie Coleman Drive in 1990, and the United States Postal Service issued a Bessie Coleman stamp in its Black Heritage series in 1995 ^[6]. She was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 2006 and the International Air and Space Hall of Fame in 2014, and in 2023 the United States Mint released a quarter bearing her image as part of the American Women Quarters Program ^[7].

Among the most repeated Bessie Coleman facts is the plainest one: no American institution would train her, so she trained herself into history anyway, in a foreign language, on borrowed money. That combination of technical daring and civil rights conviction is why the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum presents her not only as a stunt flier but as an activist who used the cockpit as a platform ^[4]. Nearly a century after her death, her name marks streets, schools, scholarships, and libraries across the United States ^[6].