Bessie Coleman

Bessie Cole­man, one of 10 kids that were born to George and Susan Cole­man, was born on Jan­u­ary 26, 1892, in the far east Texas town of Atlanta. George and Susan made ends meet by share­crop­ping, wash­ing laun­dry and cook­ing for white fam­i­lies. Grow­ing up Bessie was an excel­lent stu­dent, where she excelled at math and read­ing. She would com­plete school all the way up to eighth grade, and all of it done in a one room schoolhouse.

George moved the fam­ily to Wax­a­hachie for work rea­sons, but he left the fam­ily there and moved back to Okla­homa, once again in a quest to find bet­ter work. The inter­est­ing thing about this is that Susan and the chil­dren did not go with him. The fam­ily con­tin­ued to pick cot­ton to feed themselves.

Dur­ing all of this Bessie believed that she was des­tined for greater things than liv­ing out a mea­ger exis­tence. Try­ing to get out of the sit­u­a­tion she was in, she saved all the money she could and attended a year at the Okla­homa Col­ored Agri­cul­tural and Nor­mal Uni­ver­sity in Langston, Okla­homa. The prob­lem was that her money ran out after that amount of time and she had to go leave school. She returned home.

At the age of 23 she moved to Chicago and lived with some of her broth­ers who were liv­ing there at the time. She worked at a super­mar­ket and as a man­i­curist, but she dreamed of fly­ing. Orville and Wilbur Wright had flown their Wright Flyer in 1903, and Bessie wanted to do the same. She heard sto­ries from men return­ing from The Great War about fly­ing over the bat­tle­fields of France and they fas­ci­nated her.

With some finan­cial back­ing, she took classes in French and then in 1920 trav­eled to Paris to attend the Fed­er­a­tion Aero­nau­tique Inter­na­tionale. She’d had to travel that far to learn to fly, because Amer­i­can flight schools would not allow blacks to enroll. By 1921, after train­ing, she was the only black pilot in the world.

She became a role model, not just for black women, but peo­ple of all races, for she had over­come great obsta­cles and ful­filled her dreams. Sadly, her dream came to an end on April 30, 1926 in Jack­sonville, Florida when she crashed in the first plane she had ever owned.

She and her mechanic had taken the new plane out for a test flight. Dur­ing the flight the mechanic, who was pilot­ing the plane, expe­ri­enced engine trou­ble and lost con­trol of the air­craft. Bessie fell out of the open cock­pit of the plane and plum­meted sev­eral hun­dred feet to her death.

More than 5,000 peo­ple attended her memo­r­ial ser­vices in Chicago and another 10,000 filed past her cof­fin to pay their last respects. She gar­nered much atten­tion even in death, but she will always be the first black woman pilot.¹

1. Infor­ma­tion for this piece came from Texas Escapes and BessieColeman.com. [↩]