Bessie Coleman First African American Woman to Earn International Pilot's License

How "Brave Bessie" Overcame Racism to Earn International Fame

By Diana Vice

Diana Vice is the Honorary Regent & Historian for the General de Lafayette Chapter, Daughters of the American Revolution. She also serves as the Indiana State Chair for the E Pluribus Unum Committee, which was formed to increase awareness of often underrepresented Revolutionary War Patriots, including those who were African American, Native American and female."

Amelia Earhart was not the only woman of her era to break barriers in aviation. Though Earhart became famous for her transatlantic flights, Bessie Coleman, known as "Queen Bess" and "Brave Bessie" had already made history as the first Black and Native American woman to earn an international pilot’s license, overcoming institutional racism in the U.S. and building an influential aviation career before Earhart’s most celebrated achievements.

Born into a Texas sharecropping family, Coleman carried her ambitions north to Chicago in 1915, moving in with her brothers and taking work as a manicurist at the White Sox Barber Shop. There, as World War I pilots returned home with thrilling stories of flight, her dream of becoming a pilot began to take shape. Determined to fund that dream herself, she took a second job managing a chili parlor and saved every dollar she could toward the sky.

Coleman was even more determined to make her dreams come true after her brother told her that she would never fly as a Black woman.

“That’s it! You just called it for me,” she replied. “The air is the only place free from prejudices,” she concluded. “I knew we had no aviators, neither men or women, and I knew the Race needed to be represented along with this most important line, so I thought it my duty to risk my life to learn aviation…”

Rejected by nearly every American flight school, Coleman refused to let prejudice keep her dream on the ground. When she met Robert S. Abbott (pictured), the influential editor and publisher of the Chicago Weekly Defender, he pointed her toward France, where aviation enthusiasm still soared and barriers for women and people of color were less rigid. Determined to rise, Coleman enrolled at the Berlitz Language School in Chicago’s Loop and spent months learning French to prepare for flight school abroad. To her, mastering a new language was not an obstacle, it was a runway toward the sky.

Where some early aviation pioneers closed the cockpit to women, France offered a different vision: flight as a frontier for anyone brave enough to rise. Unlike the Wright Brothers, who refused to train women or sell them airplanes in the early 1900s, the Montgolfier Brothers had welcomed daring learners as early as the late 1700s. Less than a year after the first balloon flight in 1783, Marie Elisabeth Thible of Lyon, France, became the first woman to pilot an aircraft solo. In 1799, another woman made the world’s first female parachute jump. By the 1920s, French instructors had earned a reputation for opening the skies to women and others determined to learn. In fact, nine of the first ten women in the world to receive pilot licenses trained with French men as instructors.

Coleman was accepted into one of France’s most renowned flight schools, l’École d’Aviation des FrèresCaudron at Le Crotoy, run by French pilots and aircraft designers Gaston and René Caudron. She sailed for France on November 20, 1920, and spent the next seven months walking daily to the school, where she learned advanced maneuvers such as tailspins, banking, and loop-the-loops.

On June 15, 1921, she earned international pilot’s license No. 18310, becoming the world’s first non-Caucasian woman licensed to fly.

With commercial air travel still years away, Coleman saw that a civilian pilot could earn a living only by thrilling crowds as a barnstorming stunt flyer, turning the still-new airplane into a spectacle of daring loops and dives. To stand out in that dangerous, competitive world, she needed advanced training and a broader set of aerial tricks. When no instructor in Chicago would teach her, Coleman set her sights on Europe once more and sailed again in February 1922.

Coleman spent the next two months in France sharpening the skills she had fought so hard to earn. From there, she traveled to the Netherlands to meet Anthony Fokker, one of the world’s most distinguished aircraft designers, then continued to Germany, where she visited the Fokker Corporation and trained with one of its chief pilots. Each lesson carried her closer to the future she had imagined when so many doors had been closed to her. When she returned to the United States, she was ready to turn her hard-won training into a career in exhibition flying.

Six weeks later, Coleman came home to Chicago and took to the sky in an air show honoring World War I’s 370^th Infantry Regiment. Before a large, cheering crowd at the Checkerboard Airdrome, she carved figure eights, loops, and daring near-ground dips through the air. But the applause was only part of what drove her. Every flight carried the promise she had made to herself as a child: that one day, she would “amount to something.”

Coleman carried her mission beyond the cockpit, speaking to audiences across the country about aviation’s promise and the future of African Americans in the sky. She challenged racism wherever it tried to ground that vision and refused to perform at air shows that barred Black spectators from attending.

In the 1920s, Coleman’s speaking tour brought her to Orlando, Florida, where Reverend Hezakiah Hill and his wife, Viola, welcomed her into the parsonage of Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church on Washington Street in Parramore. Their kindness gave her something rare: a home away from the road. Treated like a daughter, Bessie chose to stay, opening a beauty shop in Orlando and saving every dollar for the prize that still pulled at her heart—an airplane of her own.

Coleman’s growing fame soon brought a tempting offer: a role in the feature-length film Shadow and Sunshine, financed by the African American Seminole Film Producing Company. She accepted at first, hoping the publicity would lift her career and help fund the flying school she dreamed of building. But when she learned the opening scene would show her in tattered clothes, carrying a walking stick and a pack on her back, she drew the line. Bessie walked off the set, turning down opportunity rather than surrender her dignity. As biographer Doris Rich wrote, “Opportunist though she was about her career, she was never an opportunist about race. She had no intention of perpetuating the derogatory image most whites had of most blacks.”

On April 30, 1926, Coleman was in Jacksonville, Florida, preparing for an airshow with a newly purchased Curtiss JN-4, or “Jenny,” that she had bought in Dallas. The plane had already shown signs of danger: her mechanic and publicity agent, 24-year-old William D. Wills, had been forced to land it three times while flying it from Dallas because it was so poorly maintained. Friends and family begged Coleman not to fly, convinced the aircraft was unsafe. But she pressed on. During takeoff, Wills piloted while Coleman sat unharnessed beside him, leaning out to study the terrain for a parachute jump planned the next day. For nearly ten minutes, the flight seemed to hold. Then, at about 3,000 feet, the plane suddenly plunged into a dive and spun out of control. Coleman was thrown from the aircraft at 2,000 feet and killed instantly when she struck the ground. Wills could not regain control; the plane crashed, exploded, and burst into flames, killing him on impact. Only later did investigators discover the cause: a wrench left inside the engine had jammed the controls. Coleman was 34 years old.

After funeral services in Florida, Coleman’s body was returned to Chicago for burial. Though most mainstream media gave her death little attention, the African American press widely reported it. In Chicago, 10,000 mourners attended ceremonies led by activist Ida B. Wells.

Coleman did not live to open the school she dreamed of for young Black aviators, but her courage lit the way for a generation of African American men and women determined to claim the sky. “Because of Bessie Coleman,” Lieutenant William J. Powell wrote in Black Wings (1934), a book dedicated to her, “We have overcome that which was worse than racial barriers. We have overcome the barriers within ourselves and dared to dream.” Powell, who served in a segregated unit during World War I, carried that dream forward through his book, his journals, and the Bessie Coleman Aero Club, which he founded in 1929.

Bessie Coleman never built the school she dreamed of, but she opened a sky wide classroom where courage itself became the lesson.

Early Life: Coleman was born on January 26, 1892, in Atlanta, Texas, the tenth of 13 children of George Coleman, an African American who may have had Cherokee or Choctaw grandparents, and Susan Richardson Coleman, an African American.