Bessie Coleman was both the first Black and first Native American woman to win pilot wings.
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Bessie Coleman seemed destined by birth to remain earthbound, poor, and obscure when
she was born on January 26, 1892 as the 10th of 14 children of sharecroppers near Atlanta, Texas. Her father
was an enrolled member of the Cherokee tribe in Indian Territory just across the border to the north. Her mother
was Black. In search of better prospects the family soon moved
to Waxahachie south of Dallas
where the girl spent most of her childhood and teen years.
When she was 9 her father abandoned the family
to return to tribal lands in Oklahoma leaving her impoverished
family to struggle. Despite
all obstacles, including having to walk four miles each day to an inferior
and segregated one room school, Bessie showed herself to be an eager
student who excelled at reading and enjoyed math. She was also dedicated to the
family’s Missionary Baptist Church.
Every
year her schooling was interrupted
to pick cotton with the rest of her
family. Her mother let Bessie keep part of her earnings from the harvest which she saved so that at age 18 she was
able to enroll at the Oklahoma Colored Agricultural and Normal University at Langston, Oklahoma. She had to drop out of school after
just one semester when her savings
ran out. Back in Waxahachie she found
some work in local beauty shops and
returned to the cotton fields every year.
But
Coleman was ambitious to escape the life that loomed ahead of
her—inevitable marriage to another
sharecropper, repeated childbirth,
and endless drudgery. In 1916 she left Waxachachie behind
forever at the age of 23 to join a brother
who had joined the Great Migration to
Chicago.
In the city she found work as a manicurist
at the White Sox Barbershop. Pretty,
personable, and smart, she attracted the attention
and support of some of her clients.
They
included a cream of the Chicago Black elite, including after
the end of the Great War in 1918,
Black veterans including some pioneering military pilots. Entranced by their stories, Coleman
decided she wanted to fly, too.
But
the obstacles once again seemed overwhelming.
No American flight schools would
train Blacks and she knew of none
that would teach women. Even the Black pilots she had met
declined to teach her. Her only option
was to go to France where they had
all trained. With luck her manicure customers and admirers included Robert S.
Abbott, founder and publisher of the Chicago
Defender, America’s premier Black owned newspaper, and banker Jesse Binga who bankrolled her trip to France.
In preparation for her adventure Coleman
took crash course in French at the Chicago Berlitz
School.
Coleman's International Pilot's License.
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Coleman arrived in Paris in November of
1920. As she expected, she was allowed
to enroll in a French flying school with no difficulty and was soon learning in
a primitive Nieuport Type 82
biplane. She was a quick
learner. On June 15, 1921 she became
simultaneously the first Black woman and
the first Native American woman to
be granted an International Pilot’s
License from the Fédération
Aéronautique Internationale. Not
content with that achievement she stayed for two more months in France to hone
her skills and log time in the air
under the advanced tutelage of from a former French ace.
Thanks
to hoopla stirred up by her sponsor
at the Defender, Coleman found
herself a minor celebrity when she
came ashore in New York that
September. Hailed as the “dusky queen of the air,” she almost
immediately launched a national speaking
tour hoping to raise money for her own aircraft.
While
on tour she met the Rev. Hezakiah Hill of the Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church in
Black Parramore neighborhood of Orlando, Florida and his wife Viola. The couple offered Coleman a home in the
church parsonage and became surrogate parents to her. It would become the anchor of her life in the frequent wanderings of the rest of her
life. She even opened her own beauty
shop to finance her flying.
Coleman designed her own pilot uniform for her lecture tours.
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The
lecture circuit was only a stop-gap
to Coleman’s goal of becoming a full-time
professional pilot. Two of the
avenues of employment were barred to her—military
service or becoming an airmail
pilot. Her only hope was to become a
barnstorming pilot. But that would require her to further sharpen
her skills as a stunt pilot.
In
February 1922 she returned to Paris for two more months of advanced stunt
flying instruction from a French ace. Then she traveled to the Netherlands to meet legendary aircraft designer Anthony Fokker who
was so impressed with her that he sent her on to his airplane factories in Germany where she received further instruction from his top test pilots. By the time she sailed for home Coleman
was probably the best trained female
pilot yet.
Coleman with a monoplane on her return to France to study stunt flying with former French aces.
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When
she returned to New York to a new
round of press attention, Abbot and the Defender
sponsored her appearance at a special air
show at Curtis Field on Long Island on September 3, 1922 in
honor of World War I veterans of the
all-Black 369th Infantry Regiment. A few weeks after that auspicious debut, she headlined a special air show at Chicago’s Checkerboard Field, now Midway
Airport.
She
flew at first in mostly rented or borrowed Curtis JN-4 “Jenny” biplanes, the
slow and lumbering staple of barnstormers.
Coleman
had a very successful barnstorming career for the next five years. She was an expert in self-promotion,
not hesitating to use either her good
looks or outsized vivacious
personality to charm even hostile
reporters. She broke into mainstream white press and was profiled in magazine cover stories and featured
in newsreels.
She
snapped up an opportunity to star in
her own feature film financed by the
African American Seminole Film Producing
Company. But her high hopes for the
movie Shadow and Sunshine were dashed
on the first day of shooting when
she was handed as script with an opening scene of her dressed in tatters and barefoot walking down a road with a knapsack.
Coleman who even as a sharecropper’s daughter was at pains to be as
clean and stylish as she could, was deeply
offended by the depiction which played to all of the racial stereotypes promoted by the White culture. She walked
off the set and turned her back on the promise of movie stardom.
Coleman
hoped to give up barnstorming and open her own flight school for young Blacks
of both sexes. She had hoped the film
would finance that plan. Without it she
resigned herself to another season or two of touring to raise the money she
needed.
In
April of 1926 Coleman purchased a
new—for her—Jenny bi-plane in Dallas. She dispatched her trusted mechanic, 24 year old William D. Willis to pick up the plane
and fly it to meet her in Jacksonville,
Florida. Willis found that the well used Jenny was in poor condition. In fact he made three forced landings on the flight to Florida. He urged Coleman not to use the plane until
he had time to give it a complete overhaul. But Coleman had a contract to perform on
May 1 and did not have time for that.
Instead she had Willis take her up for a trial flight on April 30 to familiarize herself with the
plane. Because the scheduled performance
included her making a parachute jump from
the plane, she was in the observer’s
seat and Willis at the controls. For
some reason Coleman was not strapped
into her seat.
Ten
minutes after takeoff at an altitude of 2000 feet the
plane shuddered, lurched, and then
rolled over into an uncontrolled dive. Coleman was thrown from her seat and fell
to her instant death. Willis could not regain control of the
aircraft and died in a fiery crash. It
was determined that a loose wrench slid
into the gearbox.
Dead
at just 34 years of age, Coleman shared
the fate of many pioneering flyers. Aviation was still a dangerous
business. She was widely mourned, but
quickly forgotten outside the Black community as Jazz Age White America quickly turned its attention to the next shiny object.
World War I veteran Lt. William J. Powell, a former infantry officer who dreamed of
becoming a flyer was inspired by Coleman.
Shortly after getting his own pilot’s license Powell formed the Bessie Coleman Aero Club to promote
Black aviation in 1929 and commemorated her in his 1934 book, Black
Wings.
Coleman was honored with a 1995 stamp in the Black Heritage series by the United States Postal Service.
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Coleman
was re-discovered by a wider audience
with the rising interest in Black
History. She has been honored by
roads named for her at Chicago’s O’Hare and
three other airports around the world.
The street in front of her Tampa parsonage home has also been re-named
for her and the site of the house on Chicago’s South Side where she lived with her brother has been plaqued by the Chicago Cultural Center. The
United States Post Office honored
her with a first class stamp in its Black Heritage series in 1995. And in 2006 Coleman was belatedly inducted
into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in Dayton, Ohio.
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