Coleman, Bessie (1892–1926)

First African-American woman pilot in the world who earned an international license in France in 1921 and spent the next five years touring the U.S., giving exhibition flights and speaking in theaters, churches, and schools to exhort blacks to seek their future in aviation. Born on January 26, 1892, in Atlanta, Texas; killed in fall from plane on April 30, 1926, in Jacksonville, Florida; daughter of George (a day laborer) and Susan Coleman (a domestic worker); attended one-room school for blacks in Waxahachie, Texas, to the eighth grade; spent one year at preparatory school of Colored Agricultural and Normal University in Langston, Oklahoma (now Langston University); married Claude Glenn, on January 30, 1917, but at no time did she inform her family, reside with Glenn, or use his name.

Family moved to Waxahachie, Texas (1894); with exception of school year at Langston (1910–11), resided in Waxahachie until 1915, when she moved to Chicago; was manicurist there until 1920 when she went to France for flight lessons (November 1920–September 1921); was issued license by Fédération Internationale Aéronautique (June 15, 1921); returned to France from Chicago for advance aerobatic lessons (February–August 1922); gave first exhibition flight in the world by a black woman, in New York (September 3, 1922); performed further flights in Memphis and Chicago (1922), distributed advertising leaflets by air in California (1923); was badly injured in plane crash in Santa Monica (February 4, 1923) and hospitalized until May; that same month, gave lecture series on aviation at Los Angeles YMCA (May 1923); had flight in Columbus, Ohio (1923), and flights and lectures in Houston, Galveston, San Antonio, Fort Worth, Dallas, Wharton and Waxahachie, Texas (summer 1925); gave lecture tour and exhibition flights in Savannah and Augusta, Georgia, and St. Petersburg, West Palm Beach, Orlando and Jacksonville, Florida (1926).

On July 15, 1921, Bessie Coleman, an African-American flying a French Nieuport, landed on the runway of France's finest flight school, l'École d'Aviation des Frères Caudron at Le Crotoy in the Somme. The manicurist from Chicago had won her wings from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale to become the first black woman pilot in the world. The license was duly recognized the following September in the magazine l'Aérophile in a list of 61 successful candidates, among whom Coleman was the only woman. The license-winning flight marked the end of the first 29 years of her life, starting with childhood in a Texas town where the segregated, one-room grade school closed whenever the students were needed to pick cotton. By 1915, she was working as a manicurist in a South Side Chicago barbershop. But it was only the beginning of an odyssey to show the world that a black woman could compete with the best of stunt pilots and to convince the members of her race that they, too, could seize the opportunities opening up for employment in the new technology of flight.

Born in a dirt-floored, one-room cabin in Atlanta, Texas, on January 26, 1892, Coleman was one of nine surviving children born to Susan Coleman , a domestic worker, and her husband George, a day laborer. When Bessie was two, her father moved his family to Waxahachie, Texas, where he bought one quarter of an acre of land in the segregated east side of town. On it, he built a three-room "shotgun" house, characterized by a series of doors opening from one room to the next so that one "could shoot a shotgun through the length of the house." For the next seven years, Bessie enjoyed a frugal but happy childhood, sharing household tasks with her two older brothers, who were still at home, and playing with the three younger sisters born after her. Coleman's childhood ended at nine when George Coleman proposed another move, this time to Indian Territory in Oklahoma. There, his status as the grandchild of three Native Americans assured him of the citizen's rights denied him in Texas, where both blacks and Indians were feared or despised by the majority of the white residents. When Susan refused to go, he left alone. Coleman's two brothers, Walter and John, soon departed for Chicago, leaving the nine-year-old Bessie to serve as homemaker and caretaker for her three younger sisters while her mother worked as a domestic for a white couple in Waxahachie.

Coleman's schooling was sporadic, limited by the needs of her siblings and the demand for labor in the cotton fields where whole African-American families worked whenever such seasonal labor offered additional income. The

school, one room for all eight grades, was hot in the summer and cold in the winter, a four-mile walk from home for instruction from a teacher whose own education was limited to eight grades. Yet Coleman soon became an accomplished reader, entertaining the family at night by reading aloud from the books her illiterate mother borrowed from a wagon library. They were stories of African-American heroes, among them Paul Laurence Dunbar, Harriet Tubman and Booker T. Washington. Although Uncle Tom's Cabin was one of her favorites, after reading it Coleman once declared: "I'll never be a Topsy or an Uncle Tom!"

A gifted math student as well, Bessie became the family's bookkeeper, toting up the weight of the cotton picked by Susan and her children. She proved a reluctant picker who sometimes sat on the long bag as it was dragged along the rows by some unsuspecting adult. However, she demonstrated her worth at the scales, where she not only calculated the family's wages but put her foot on the scale whenever "the man" looked away. Beautiful, healthy, intelligent and with a sense of self-worth unmarred by poverty and racism, Coleman was determined to "amount to something," as her ambitious church-going mother had adjured her.

Her first escape from Waxahachie came in 1910 when she left for Langston, Oklahoma, to attend the Colored Agricultural and Normal University with tuition earned and saved from her labor as a laundress. But records reveal that she needed further work at the preparatory school before starting undergraduate studies, and at the end of the year, her funds exhausted, she returned to Waxahachie to labor again as a laundress, delivering her work at the back doors of her white employers.

By 1915, when she was 23, Coleman left for Chicago, where her brother Walter, a Pullman porter, offered her shelter until she could find a job. Balking at becoming a domestic, as most African-American women with limited educations were in Chicago, she became a manicurist. Within a year, she won a contest sponsored by the black weekly, the Chicago Defender, as the best and fastest manicurist in black Chicago. But this was not, in Coleman's view, "amounting to something" in the eyes of her own people or the whole world.

I point to Bessie Coleman and say without hesitation that here is a woman, a being who exemplifies and serves as a model to all humanity, the very definition of strength, dignity, courage, integrity, and beauty.

—Mae Jemison, MD and first black woman astronaut

Not until the age of 28 did she find the goal she sought. On a fall day in 1920, her brother John, a World War I veteran who had served in France, entered the barber shop where she worked and began telling the customers that the women in France were better than the women in black Chicago. The French women, he said, could even fly airplanes! "That's it," she said. "You just called it for me!" Undoubtedly she had already seen newsreels and films glorifying World War aviators, but the Coleman family credited John's taunt as providing the ultimate motivation in her decision to become a flier.

Within days, she sought someone to teach her but soon discovered that while it was hard enough for even white women to get flying instruction, for a black woman it was impossible. Coleman turned for help to one of Chicago's most influential African-Americans, Robert Abbott, editor and publisher of the Defender. Abbott advised her to go to France, a recognized national leader in aviation, where racism did not exist. If she would learn French, he said, he would help her apply to a school there. She did, at a Michigan Avenue language school, and by November of 1920 she sailed for France.

Coleman learned to fly in six months at the best school in France, managed by plane designers and aviators Gaston and René Caudron. But on her return to the United States in September, she soon realized that just being a pilot was not enough to gain the attention of a public avid for the stunts of daredevil circus fliers. Determined as ever, she returned to Europe the following February to take aerobatic lessons in France. She then journeyed to Holland where Anthony Fokker taught her to fly the world-renowned planes that he himself had designed, and finally to Germany, where one of her teachers was a World War I flying ace.

Arriving back in New York in August of 1922, on September 3 she gave an exhibition flight in Long Island, attended by several thousand spectators and praised by critics in both black and white newspapers. Coleman's race, gender and flying skill all contributed to the attention that followed. In addition, she possessed a sense of drama, her beauty augmented by the costume she had designed: military jacket, riding breeches, a long leather coat and a leather helmet with goggles pushed up so the audience could see her face as she climbed into the cockpit of her plane. Her poise and self-assurance were also evident in interviews for the press, and, like most aviators of the period, she was not averse to exaggeration in declaiming her adventures in Europe. Her debut in Long Island was followed by successful shows in Memphis and Chicago.

Not long after that, her promising career stalled when she broke a contract with a black movie company that had hired her to star in a film. The company had failed to tell her that she was to play an ignorant black girl who comes from the country to the big city, a role she viewed as demeaning to the women of her race and particularly to those she had known in Texas. A year later, she met and gave flying lessons to an advertising executive for an automobile tire company in California. He offered to buy her a plane if she in turn would airdrop advertising leaflets for his company. She bought the plane in Coronado, a war surplus JN-4, or "Jenny," army trainer. But on her first flight in it, the plane stalled and crashed soon after takeoff. She spent the next four months in a Santa Monica hospital recuperating from a broken leg and other injuries. Yet, before she left California, Coleman gave a series of lectures at the Los Angeles YMCA, revealing her growing determination to open a school for black aviators.

She returned to Chicago without a job or a plane and, with the exception of one show in Columbus, Ohio, it was more than a year before she could find the backing for an exhibition tour in Texas, during the summer of 1925. The tour was a resounding success, with appearances in Houston, Dallas, Wharton, Richmond, San Antonio, Fort Worth, and Waxahachie, where she insisted there be a non-segregated main gate for ticket holders. In addition to stunt flying and parachute jumping, she also lectured on aviation in African-American theaters, churches, and schools.

After a brief return to Chicago, Coleman left in January of 1926 for theatrical engagements in Savannah and Augusta, Georgia, and followed this by engagements and exhibition flights in St. Petersburg, Tampa, and West Palm Beach, Florida. At the invitation of Baptist minister Hezakiah and Viola Hill , his wife, Coleman next spent two months in Orlando, when she wrote to her sister, Elois , that she was at last nearing her goal of raising enough capital to open a flight school. She left Orlando for Jacksonville, Florida, for an engagement sponsored by the Negro Welfare League, an exhibition flight scheduled for May 1, 1926. With money from an Orlando benefactor, she paid for another army surplus "Jenny" to be flown by a mechanic-pilot from Love Field, Texas, to Jacksonville—a trip that required three forced landings.

On April 30, the day before the exhibition was to take place, Coleman asked the mechanic-pilot to fly her over the field where she was to make a parachute jump. Too short to see over the cockpit's edge, she wore no safety belt, and, as she leaned out to survey the field below, the plane suddenly accelerated and flipped over. She fell 1,500 feet to her death. The plane crashed nearby, killing the pilot.

In her efforts to raise money for an aviation school open to blacks and to convince members of her race that there were opportunities for them in aviation, Coleman found countless obstacles. There were black men who resented a black woman doing what they could not. There were also many black women, often the most effective activists for civil liberties and better schools, who were too socially conservative to accept the colorful Coleman. African-American newspapers covered her appearances when possible but were limited in size, circulation, and money. The white press not only failed to give her the publicity she needed but often belittled her as well. Even in the story of her death, two Jacksonville newspapers referred to her as "the Coleman woman," or just "the woman," while identifying the pilot as "Mr. Wills."

Only in death was Bessie Coleman finally honored. She was given three funerals, one in Jacksonville, another in Orlando, and the last in Chicago, where 10,000 people filled the Pilgrim Baptist Church and spilled out into the surrounding streets. Coleman left a heritage of growing interest in aviation on the part of both men and women of her race. She was the founder of a movement that embraced Chicago's Checkerboard Field pilots of the 1930s, the visionary Lt. William J. Powell, founder of Bessie Coleman flying clubs, and the renowned Tuskegee U.S. Army fighter pilots of World War II. Bessie Coleman is buried at Lincoln Cemetery in Chicago.

sources:

"Chicago Colored Girl Learns to Fly," in Aerial Age Weekly. October 17, 1921.

"Colored Aviatrix Bobs Up Again," in Air Service Newsletter. February 20, 1926.

Hardesty, Von and Dominic Pisano. Black Wings: The American Black in Aviation. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987.

King, Anita. "Family Tree: Brave Bessie, First Black Pilot," in Essence. Part 1, May 1976; part 2, June 1976.

Patterson, Elois. Memoirs of the Late Bessie Coleman, Aviatrix. Privately printed, 1969.

Rich, Doris L. Queen Bess: Daredevil Aviator. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993.

collections:

African-American newspapers (originals and/or micro-films) at: Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C.; City of Dallas Public Library, Dallas, Texas; Eartha White Collection, Thomas F. Carpenter Library, University of North Florida, Jacksonville, Florida; Eugene C. Barker Texas History Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas; Houston Metropolitan Research Center, Houston Public Library, Houston, Texas; Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana; Memphis Shelby County Public Library, Memphis, Tennessee; Pennsylvania State University Library, University Park, Pennsylvania; Rosenberg Library, Galveston Public Library, Galveston, Texas; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York, New York; Soper Library, Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland; State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin.

papers and memorabilia:

DuSable Museum of African American History, Chicago, Illinois; National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

Doris L. Rich , author of Amelia Earhart: A Biography (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989) and Queen Bess: Daredevil Aviator (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993)