Aviation · 1892–1926
Bessie Coleman
Surprising fact
No flying school in America would teach her, so she learned French and moved to France to earn her licence.
Bessie Coleman was born in a one-room cabin in Texas, the tenth of thirteen children of a family that picked cotton. When she first saw an aeroplane at a fair as a child, the pilot flipped it upside down, and she decided she wanted to fly.
No flying school in the United States would take a Black student, and no pilot would train a woman. So she learned French at night, saved her wages as a manicurist in Chicago, and sailed for France in 1921. At Le Crotoy she earned her licence from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, seven months before Amelia Earhart.
She came home to headlines and found that fame did not pay. To make a living she took her licence to the air-show circuit, and the press called her Queen Bess. She refused to fly at an event unless the organisers dropped the rule that Black spectators entered through a separate gate.
In 1926 she was rehearsing a jump with a mechanic at the controls when the plane stalled and spun. She fell to her death at thirty-four. The mechanic could not be saved either.
Ten thousand people came to her funeral in Orlando. The pilots who followed her, in the Second World War and after, called themselves the Bessie Coleman Aviators Club.
Sources: Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum; Encyclopædia Britannica.
The quiz
No American flying school would admit Bessie Coleman, so in 1921 she did something unusual. What?
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