Bessie Coleman
Every American flight school Bessie Coleman applied to rejected her — because she was Black, because she was a woman, or both at once. So she learned French, moved to France, and earned her international pilot's license from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale in 1921. She returned to America as a barnstormer and refused to perform at any airshow that required Black audience members to use separate entrances. She was planning a flight school for Black Americans when she died at 34. The school she dreamed of never opened. But Mae Jemison carried her photo into space.
Bessie Coleman grew up in Waxahachie, Texas, the tenth of thirteen children. Her father was part Cherokee and left the family when she was young. She picked cotton. She put herself through one semester of college at the Colored Agricultural and Normal University in Langston, Oklahoma before the money ran out.
She moved to Chicago in 1915 and worked as a manicurist in the White Sox barbershop on the South Side. She was surrounded by men returning from World War I with stories of flying in France. She decided she wanted to fly.
Every American aviation school she applied to turned her down. Some rejected her because she was Black. Some because she was a woman. The combination made her application not worth considering in 1919 America.
She did not stop. She found a mentor in Robert Abbott, founder of the Chicago Defender, who encouraged her to try France. She spent eighteen months learning French while working in Chicago, then sailed to Europe in 1920. She enrolled at the Ecole d'Aviation des Freres Caudron in Normandy.
On June 15, 1921, Bessie Coleman received her international pilot's license from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale. She was the first Black woman in the world to hold a pilot's license. She was also, through her Cherokee heritage, the first Native American woman to hold one.
She returned to America as a barnstormer and aerial stunt performer. She drew enormous crowds — Black and white — at airshows across the country. She had a strict policy: she would not perform at any event that required Black audience members to enter through separate gates or sit in separate sections. If the organizers wouldn't agree, she didn't fly.
She spent the last years of her life planning a flight school for Black Americans in Florida. She was in Jacksonville for a practice run when her plane went into an uncontrolled spin at 3,500 feet on April 30, 1926. She was thrown from the open cockpit. She died on impact. She was thirty-four years old.
The flight school was never built. But in 1992, when Mae Jemison became the first Black woman in space, she carried a photo of Bessie Coleman into orbit with her.
I refused to take no for an answer.Bessie Coleman
She was rejected by an entire country's aviation system and responded by learning a new language and earning her license on another continent. She died at 34 before she could build the institution she planned. The flight school for Black Americans she envisioned never opened because she didn't live long enough to see it through.
Bessie Coleman didn't ask permission. She built a path around every closed door, came back with credentials no one could dispute, and used her platform to refuse segregation on her own terms. She would not fly for audiences that couldn't all get in the same gate.
The institution she dreamed of — a flight school where Black Americans could learn to fly — took decades to partially materialize through programs like the Tuskegee Airmen's training at Moton Field. She is the reason they had a model. She showed it was possible first.