Bessie Coleman: soaring to new heights in aviation

Refusing to be held back by gender roles and race. Bessie Coleman became a pilot, ensuring other people of color could take flight as well.

Born January 26, 1892, Elizabeth “Bessie” Colman grew up in an impoverished Texas town. She was 10 of 13 children to African-American mother Susan and father George, who worked as sharecroppers. Bessie grew up picking cotton and walked for miles to attend a one-room school. While naturally bright and inquisitive, she could not afford university.

Her family moved to Chicago in 1919, where she worked as a manicurist. After hearing the tales of heroic pilots during World War I, she desperately wanted to learn to fly. Her chances of becoming a pilot were slim. As her brother teased her by saying a black woman would never fly, Colman's mind was set. “That’s it! You just called it for me!”

It became clear that becoming a pilot in the US was not going to happen. She applied to many flight schools and was instantly dismissed. She found hope in tales of female pilots in France. Not taking no for an answer, she set her sights on France.

To pay for the trip, she scrimped and saved from various jobs. At night, she taught herself French. In 1920, Colman travelled to France and started training at the Caudron Brother’s School of Aviation in La Crotoy. For seven months, she trained on an Nieuport 82 biplane that didn’t even have brakes. Each landing, she relied on a metal bar underneath the plane to hook the ground. But on June 15, 1921 she became the first black woman to earn an international pilot’s license.

This allowed her to return to the US, where she took up barnstorming. As a popular form of entertainment, in the 1920s, pilots would perform all manner of tricks and stunts. From her 1922 debut flight, in a borrowed plane as she didn’t have her own, Colman became a headline-grabbing barnstormer and earned the nickname “Queen Bess”. Wanting to be more than just an entertainer, she aimed to inspire people of color, particularly women, to pursue aviation. She said, “The air is the only place free of prejudice.”

Colman gave talks about her flights and performed across the country. She refused to participate in air shows with segregated entrances and turned down a film role due to the character needing to dress in rags, which she saw as demeaning to poor black people. Her ambition was to set up her own flight school.

Tragically, on April 30, 1926, while practicing for a show in Jacksonville Florida, her plane spun out of control, and Coleman was thrown from the open cockpit at 2,000 feet. Her mechanic, William Wills, who was flying with her, died in the crash as well.

While her flying career was short, Coleman became a heroine in the African-American community. Thousands attended her funeral, and her eulogy was read by Ida B Wells, the co-founder of the NAACP. Her fate was like many other early aviators, but she defied limitations placed on her for her gender and race. She earned the respect of the flying community.

William Powell, who founded the Bessie Coleman Aero Club a few years after her death, wrote that thanks to her, “We have overcome that which was worse than racial barriers. We have overcome the barriers within ourselves and dared to dream.”