Bessie Coleman

Bessie Coleman (1892 – 1926) Coleman was the first female pilot of African American descent, and also the first woman of Native American descent, to hold a pilot’s license. She also was the first Black person to earn an international pilot’s license. On April 30, 1926, Coleman was tragically killed at only 34 years old when an accident during a rehearsal for an aerial show sent her plummeting to her death.

• Born Jan. 26, 1892, in Atlanta, Texas, she was one of thirteen children born to sharecroppers George and Susan Coleman. Her mother was an African American maid, and her father George Coleman was a sharecropper of mixed Native American and African American descent.
• In 1910, Bessie took all her savings and enrolled in the Colored Agricultural and Normal University (Langston University) in Oklahoma but did not finish. At age 23, Coleman went to live with her brothers in Chicago. She went to the Burnham School of Beauty Culture in 1915 and became a manicurist in a local barbershop.
• Meanwhile, her brothers who served in the military during World War I came home with stories of their time in France and how the French women were allowed to learn how to fly airplanes. She applied to many flight schools across the country, but no school would take her because she was both African American and a woman.
• Robert Abbot, a famous African American newspaper publisher told her to move to France where she could learn how to fly. Since her application to flight schools needed to be written in French, she began taking French classes at night. In 1915 she was awarded her Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (international pilot’s license) after training at Caudron Brothers School of Aviation in Le Crotoy, France, in just seven months.
• William J. Powell established the Bessie Coleman Aero Club in Los Angeles in1929. In 1931, the Challenger Pilots’ Association of Chicago began an annual flyover at Chicago’s Lincoln Cemetery to honor Bessie. Flyers like the Five Blackbirds, the Flying Hobos, the Tuskegee Airmen, and others proceeded to make Bessie’s dream a reality as a result of being affiliated, educated, or inspired directly or indirectly by the aeroclub.
• In 1977, women pilots in Chicago established the Bessie Coleman Aviators Club.
• In 1995, the U.S. Postal Service issued a “Bessie Coleman” stamp commemorating “her singular accomplishment in becoming the world’s first African American pilot, and by definition, an American legend.”