Being both Black and Native American, Bessie Coleman faced a far greater struggle in earning her pilot’s license than Amelia Earhart. And Bessie got hers six months before Amelia. Due to racist policies in the U.S., Bessie had to travel to Europe to learn to fly.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: June 15, 1921--
Born in 1892 in Texas to a Cherokee father and a Black mother, Bessie walked four miles each way to attend a segregated school where she excelled in reading and math. She attended university for a year, but after her money ran out, she was forced to leave, and eventually wound up in Chicago where she heard tales of flying machines from pilots returning from World War I. No American flying schools admitted women or Black people, but she said fuck that I’m doing it anyway.
She was encouraged to go abroad to learn to fly by Robert Abbott, who was founder and publisher of the Chicago Defender, the largest-circulation Black-owned newspaper in the country. Abbott wrote about her quest to become a pilot and both he and Jesse Binga, the first Black man to own a private bank in the U.S., sponsored her trip to France.
First, Coleman learned to speak French, then she traveled to Paris in the fall of 1920 and began her training. On June 15, 1921, she became the first Black woman and the first Native American to earn a pilot’s license. She was also the first Black person to earn an international aviation license from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, which is the world governing body for air sports.
She spent an additional two months in France learning from a WWI ace, then returned home to much fanfare and media attention. Coleman soon realized that the money was in “barnstorming,” being part of a literal flying circus as a stunt pilot. But no one would train her as a daredevil because racist-as-fuck-America. So she went back to Europe and spent several months in France, the Netherlands, and Germany learning to defy gravity in an airplane to entertain an audience.
It would be 15 months after earning her pilot’s license that she performed in her first airshow. The event, held on Long Island, was sponsored by her friend Robert Abbott, who billed Coleman as “the world’s greatest woman flier.” Over the next few years she performed regularly and was much admired. Determined to fight racism, she spoke frequently about the need to open aviation to more Black pilots. She refused to fly in any show that did not allow Black people in the audience.
She earned the nicknames Queen Bess and Brave Bessie. It was her desire to start a school dedicated to training Black pilots, but it was not to be. On April 30, 1926, Coleman was testing a newly purchased plane that had been poorly maintained. It went into an unexpected spin and threw her from the aircraft; she died on impact, aged 34. Later, many Black pilots would say they were drawn to flying because of Bessie Coleman.
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