Bessie Coleman

Bessie Coleman was born on 26 January 1892 in Atlanta, Texas, the tenth of thirteen children born to a family of sharecroppers. Her early life was defined by hard labour in the cotton fields and long walks to a segregated one-room schoolhouse. Despite these constraints, she was an eager student, particularly gifted in mathematics, and managed to complete one term at Langston Industrial College in Oklahoma before running out of funds and returning home.

In 1915 Coleman moved to Chicago to live with her brothers, working as a manicurist in a barbershop frequented by pilots returning from the First World War, whose stories of flight captivated her. She resolved to become a pilot herself, but every American flight school she approached refused to train her — because she was Black, and because she was a woman. Rather than abandon the goal, she began saving money and taking French lessons at night, having learned that flight schools in France did not practise the same exclusions.

With financial backing from Robert Abbott, publisher of the Chicago Defender, and other Black community sponsors, Coleman travelled to France in 1920 to train at the Caudron Brothers' School of Aviation. In June 1921 she earned her international pilot's licence from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, becoming the first Black woman and the first Native American woman in the world to hold one — years before Amelia Earhart earned her licence.

Returning to the United States, Coleman found that no one would hire her as a commercial pilot, so she carved out a career as a stunt flyer, performing daring loops, figure-eights and parachute jumps at airshows across the country, earning the nickname 'Queen Bess.' She used her growing fame deliberately: she refused to perform at any venue that would not admit Black spectators, and lectured to Black audiences, particularly children, encouraging them to pursue aviation despite the barriers she herself had faced.

Coleman dreamed of opening a flight school for Black aviators, but she never got the chance to realise it. On 30 April 1926, while conducting a practice flight ahead of an airshow in Jacksonville, Florida, a wrench left in the aircraft's engine jammed the controls; her mechanic and co-pilot lost control of the plane, and Coleman, who was not wearing a seatbelt so she could lean out to scout parachute landing sites, was thrown from the aircraft and killed instantly at age 34.

Her death was mourned across Black America, with thousands attending memorial services in Florida, Chicago and beyond. In 1929 the Bessie Coleman Aero Club was founded in her honour, training a new generation of Black aviators, including some of the pilots who would later become the Tuskegee Airmen. Chicago pilots have flown over her grave every year since 1931 in tribute, and in 1995 the US Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp bearing her image.