Bessie Coleman Was Turned Away by American Flight Schools, So She Learned French and Flew Anyway

Bessie Coleman was born on January 26, 1892, in a one-room cabin in Waxahachie, Texas, one of thirteen children. Her parents, George and Susan, were sharecroppers who could not read. Her father had significant Native American ancestry. As a girl she walked four miles each way to a one-room schoolhouse and helped the family by collecting and delivering laundry.

She saved enough to attend Langston Industrial College in Oklahoma, but the money lasted only one semester. Around 1915 she joined the Great Migration north to Chicago, trained at a beauty school, and went to work as a manicurist.

Her brothers came home from service in the U.S. Army during World War I with stories that women were flying airplanes in France. Coleman wanted to fly. She applied to flight schools in the United States and was rejected because she was Black and because she was a woman. Jim Crow laws and the prejudice of the era left no American door open to her.

For many people, that would have been the end of the idea. Coleman treated it as a problem of route rather than a final answer.

Robert S. Abbott, the publisher of the Chicago Defender, one of the most influential Black newspapers in the country, advised her to go abroad, where she could train. Following that advice, Coleman began studying French and took better paying work to save for the trip. Learning a new language as an adult, while working, in order to qualify for training on another continent was itself a long first step.

On November 20, 1920, Coleman sailed for France. When flight schools in Paris stopped accepting women after an accident, she went north to the Caudron brothers' aviation school at Le Crotoy in the Somme. The course covered tail spins, banking, and looping the loop, and she finished it in about seven months.

On June 15, 1921, the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale issued her an international pilot's license. She became the first African American woman to earn a pilot's license, and the first woman of African American and Native American descent to hold one.

Back in the United States, the only living open to her as a pilot was exhibition flying. She performed loops, figure eights, and other stunts, and her 1922 Chicago appearance drew more than 2,000 spectators. The work was dangerous. In 1923, an engine failure in Los Angeles sent her plane down from about 300 feet, and she was hurt with a broken leg, broken ribs, and cuts to her face. She recovered and kept flying.

She also used her name to push for fairness. In her hometown of Waxahachie she objected to separate entrance gates for Black and white spectators, and organizers allowed one entrance, though seating stayed segregated. In Orlando, she threatened to withdraw from a show limited to white attendees, and the organizers relented. To fund her larger dream, a flight school for African Americans, she lectured, sought film backing, and opened a beauty shop.

On April 30, 1926, Coleman was riding in a plane piloted by her mechanic, William D. Wills, ahead of an event in Jacksonville, Florida. A loose wrench jammed the controls, the plane flipped, and Coleman, who was not strapped in, fell to her death. Wills was also killed. She was 34. Thousands attended her funeral in Chicago, including Ida B. Wells-Barnett.

She never opened her school. But after her death, the Bessie Coleman Aero Club was formed in her memory to bring aviation to African American communities, and the Smithsonian notes that its influence reached people who later became Tuskegee Airmen. The door she found by going around the closed ones stayed open for others.