Bessie Coleman: Aviator
Bessie Coleman, born Jan. 26, 1892 in Atlanta, Texas, was the first American woman of color to earn a pilot’s license.
Coleman was the tenth of thirteen children of Susan and George Coleman. Susan was an African American maid and housekeeper. George, who was also partially Native American, was a farmer and cotton picker. In the Jim Crow era, those were among the most common jobs available to anyone of color in the South. Segregation and discrimination spurred George to move to Oklahoma with some of the children in hopes of more opportunity. Coleman stayed with her mother in Texas, where she attended a one-room schoolhouse. At 18, she was accepted to Colored Agricultural and Normal University in Langston Oklahoma. But after just one semester, she had to leave when money ran out for college.
By 1915, the Great Migration was in full force and Coleman joined millions of other black Americans headed north. She landed in Chicago where two of her brothers had already gone, went to beauty school and became a manicurist in a South Side barbershop. It was there that she got inspired and challenged to fly. According to accounts, her brother, John, recently back from fighting in Europe during World War I, told her how progressive France was. There were women flying planes over there, he said, something black women wouldn’t ever be able to do here in America.
Something clicked inside Coleman and she determined to prove him and society wrong. But it wouldn’t be easy. No flight school or pilot would take her as a student because she was a woman and an African American. Coleman had won a contest sponsored by a local Chicago newspaper as the best and fastest manicurist in the area. Through the contest, she met Robert Abbott, the newspaper’s African American publisher who would become a friend and financial supporter. He urged her to look at aviation schools in France. The French were aviation pioneers and they had a reputation for training women. Following his advice, Coleman began French language lessons and started looking for benefactors besides Abbott to augment her own efforts at saving money. She sent an application to the renowned Caudron flying school in Le Crotoy, France. In 1920, they accepted her for their training program.
Finally, Coleman’s dreams of flying were taking flight.
In France, Coleman learned to fly in a 27-foot long biplane, a flimsy shell of today’s modern jets. It had a 40-foot wingspan, no brakes, no steering wheel, only a wooden stick for maneuveuring. The plane came down hard on landing and the pilot had to deploy a metal skid on the tail to come to a full stop. There were no seat belts and learning to fly took courage, as Coleman found out when a fellow student died during one of her training sessions.
On June 21, 1921, having completed and passed the ten-month program in seven months, Coleman was granted a pilot’s license from the Federation Aeronautique Internationale. The license meant she could fly anywhere in the world.
Few women were commercial aviators in the 1920s so Coleman knew her best chance at a career was to become a barnstormer. Barnstorming or aerial stunt performing was dazzling and dangerous. Coleman thrilled audiences with her daredevil stunts: loop de loops, figure eights in the air, sharp banks, parachuting and even walking on the wings of her plane while another pilot flew. Coleman had an uncanny sense of image. She performed often in a military style costume and made herself up to be a strong glamorous aviatrix. In no time, newspapers across the country crowned her Queen Bess and Brave Bessie for her performances.
Even as she became famous, Coleman still faced obstacles. Men resented her for doing what they wanted to do. Black women envied her beauty and poise but couldn’t relate her career to their own struggles.
For a brief time, Coleman was courted by Hollywood. She had a movie contract but broke it when the script called for her to play a dumb African American country girl. It was a role, she said, that was demeaning and she refused to do anything that would not align with her values and dignity.
Coleman’s dream of flying had a larger purpose. She wanted to open a flight school and give black Americans a chance to become pilots, literally giving them an avenue to soar at a new opportunity. She was saving her earnings to do that when she had a crash at an air show that put her flying career temporarily on hold. While she recovered, she continued to be in the public eye, touring the country speaking about flying, showing films about her exploits and promoting amateur aviation. She refused to participate in any event that was segregated or discriminated against black Americans.
In 1926 Coleman was back in the air. She had just purchased a plane and was on a practice run for an air show when the plane suddenly nose-dived, went into a tailspin and crashed. Coleman fell out of the plane plunging to her death. She was 34. It is reported that more than 10,000 people attended her funeral service in Chicago before she was buried at Lincoln Cemetery.
In her short career, Bessie Coleman was a comet that lit up the aviation world and then flamed out. She boldly shattered stereotypes and more than exceeded her own desire to “amount to something.” The Bessie Coleman Aero School, the flight school she so passionately wanted to create was established three years after her death in Los Angeles. Other recognition took much longer. In 1995, the US Postal System issued a Bessie Coleman stamp. In 2005, 79 years after her death she was enshrined in the National Aviation Hall of Fame. And in 2023, the US Mint will release a Bessie Coleman quarter.
©2023 Alice Look
Co-founder, Remarkable Women Project.org
Executive Producer, Remarkable Women Project