Bessie Coleman

Bessie Coleman was born on the twenty-sixth of January 1892 at Atlanta, Texas — a small town in the Ark-La-Tex region on the Texas–Arkansas border — the tenth of thirteen children of George Coleman — a sharecropper of African-American-and-Cherokee descent — and Susan Coleman, a former enslaved field hand of the East Texas cotton economy. She was raised in the rural Black-Cherokee household of the share-cropping cotton-and-corn fields of Atlanta, Texas.

She was placed at the local Coloured one-room schoolhouse for the limited primary education available to Black children of post-Reconstruction East Texas, and she walked four miles each way to the schoolhouse. She picked cotton with her mother from the age of six to support the household.

She took the basic education through the eighth grade and one year of preparatory study at the Coloured Agricultural and Normal University at Langston, Oklahoma, before she had to withdraw at eighteen for lack of funds. She moved to Chicago in 1915 at twenty-three to live with two of her brothers — Walter and John — at the South Side of Chicago.

She took employment as a manicurist at the White Sox Barbershop at 35th Street and State Street in the South Side and was heard at the barbershop in 1919 from her brother John — who had returned from First World War service in France — of the French women who were learning to fly aircraft. The remark planted the determination.

She was rejected by every American flight school of the period — both for being Black and for being a woman — and turned in late 1919 to Robert Sengstacke Abbott, the publisher of the Chicago Defender newspaper. Abbott counselled her to learn French and apply to French flight schools.

She enrolled in November 1920 at the École d’Aviation des Frères Caudron at Le Crotoy, near Amiens in northern France — having sailed for France from New York in the autumn of 1920 — and completed the seven-month flight-instruction course at the École Caudron under the instructor Edmond Thieffry.

She was issued the international pilot’s licence number 18,310 by the Fédération aéronautique internationale at Le Crotoy on the fifteenth of June 1921 — the first Black woman in the world to hold an international pilot’s licence, predating by two years the first American Black female aviator (Hubert Julian was male) and by seven years the first Black male American pilot to receive an FAI licence.

She returned to the United States in September 1921 and gave her first exhibition flight at Garden City, Long Island on the third of September 1922 in a Curtiss JN-4 ‘Jenny’ trainer aircraft — billed in the press as Queen Bess. She conducted across the following four years over fifty paid exhibition flights at the Black-community air shows of Chicago, Memphis, Atlanta, and Houston.

She was killed at Jacksonville, Florida on the thirtieth of April 1926 — the day before she was to give an exhibition flight at the Jacksonville Negro Welfare League air show — when her Curtiss JN-4 aircraft fell three thousand feet at the close of a pre-show inspection flight. She was thrown from the open cockpit and killed instantly. She was thirty-four.

She is honored here as the first Black woman pilot.