FEATURE image: Contemporary poster of American aviator Bessie Coleman (1892-1926) along Bessie Coleman Street in the Gateway Gardens district at Frankfurt Airport in Germany. PHOTO CREDIT: DSC06136 Frankfurt Flughafen Gateway Gardens Bessie-Coleman-Straße” by X-angel is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Bessie Coleman, first licensed Black female aviator, was born on January 26, 1892 in Texas. Her father was American Indian and separated from the family when Bessie was 7 years old to live in Oklahoma. Bessie Coleman lived with her mother in Texas as her older siblings had moved away. In the 1890s and into the first half of the 20th century, segregation and discrimination against Blacks and people of color was not only the prevailing and demeaning social practice but also, to one degree or another, the law of the land. In this milieu of racism, Bessie was encouraged by her mother to work hard in school where Bessie became an avid reader. At 18 years old she spent one semester at today’s Langston University in Oklahoma but like many people then and now, she didn’t have the funds to continue. She returned to live and work beside her mother who was a maid and sharecropper. When Bessie was 23, full of life and ambition, she moved to Chicago to live with her older brothers where she worked hard at menial jobs – manicurist, restaurant server. But she also enjoyed living in the free(r) air of Chicago. During the war, her brothers served overseas in France and came back and told Bessie how much better the French treated women and Blacks than in America, even Chicago at the time of its Great Migration. In America, women could not even vote until 1920. Coleman’s brothers told Bessie that in France some women even flew airplanes! Stateside, that kind of thing was reserved for very wealthy, virtually all white men, who flew mostly for fun. Bessie applied to American flight schools anyway – and appallingly received a blanket rejection. Enter Black Chicago millionaire Robert Abbott (1870-1940), owner of the Chicago Defender. Abbott met and liked Bessie’s goals – he told her to go to France and get that pilot’s license. The French accepted her application and she crossed the Atlantic to enroll in flight school there. Flying in those days was an especially dangerous enterprise. There was not even a seat belt in the open cockpit to secure pilots in their seats. There were many accidents of the relatively new technology that involved what were often fragile and sometimes rickety aircraft and inexperienced pilots. Bessie became the first Black and American Indian woman to receive a pilot’s license and returned to the United States to practice her skills. But she had no money to execute her dream just yet. One way to earn money and eventually buy her own plane – as well as inspire other women and girls and people of color to fly – was to find regular, if acutely dangerous, jobs as a stunt pilot. But she ran into the same dead end as before – no American schools would accept a Black woman for the specialized training even though she had earned her pilot’s license.
Bessie returned to France to find the training she needed. All her travails and successes were not ignored in America, and at her second return home from France as a licensed pilot and stunt person Bessie enjoyed mostly positive attention in the press. It was 1922 and Bessie was prepared to soar. Her lifelong friend, Robert Abbott stepped up to arrange her first show in New York City which got the press buzzing. Back to Chicago, her home, Bessie performed in more and more air shows. To be a stunt pilot meant to be fearless and Bessie’s stunts across the country were making her very popular. Bessie wanted to work and maintain her own plane but didn’t have the money to do so. So, she borrowed any plane she could get her hands on to continue her work as a Black woman licensed stunt pilot who was famous for her figure eights and loop-de-loops in the air. While some woman walked on airplane wings, none piloted the plane also like Bessie did. Americans nicknamed her “Queen Bess” and “Brave Bess” and she was a cultural phenomenon as the roaring 1920’s got going.
As she was determined to do so, Bessie Coleman was making a difference in the nation. Of all these remarkable things in the air Bessie was known for, none was more significant than what she also achieved on the ground. Bessie Coleman told show promoters and managers that she would not perform at any show whose audience or performers were segregated by race or anything else. “Brave Bess” insisted that for all shows she performed in, there had to be just one gate for all people to walk through. At the time this was a profoundly radical request, particularly south of the Mason-Dixon line. In addition to her stunt pilot work, Bessie lectured at schools and churches and proselytized for aviation, particularly to the young. Still wanting to buy her own airplane, in 1923 she bought one but ended up crashing it and broke her leg and several ribs. As she recovered in Chicago, Bessie didn’t fly for a year. When she finally returned to flying in 1926, she had no money to buy another plane and was generously given a used one by a wealthy businessman. It was more rickety than anyone desired and Bessie hired a mechanic to get it to hum. In Florida for what would be her final airshow, her plane was flown from Texas by her trusted mechanic, William Wills. Along the way Wills had to make several emergency landings -the plane’s engine kept conking out. Following repairs made in Florida, he and Bessie went up for a practice dry run on April 30, 1926, the day before the show. They tested the plane as Bessie hunted for locations for her stunts. During that practice flight, something went wrong mechanically and, as Bessie leaned out of the cockpit not wearing a seatbelt to surveil the landscape, she fell out to her death. When the plane crashed, William Wills also died. Coleman was 34; Wills was 24. By the third memorial service in Chicago where Bessie Coleman is buried (Lincoln Cemetery in Blue Island), over 20,000 people had attended her services. In Chicago there were 15,000 mourners and famous Black journalist and Chicagoan, Ida B. Wells (1862-1931), read an essay where she spoke on the important work and legacy of Bessie Coleman. In 1929 Black engineer, business owner, and aviator William J. Powell (1897-1942) founded a flight school in Los Angeles named for Bessie Coleman that taught Black men and woman to fly. By the 1930’s, large groups of Black female stunt pilots such as the Blackbirds, took their inspiration from Bessie Coleman to new heights. In 1940 Robert Abbott, the millionaire newspaper publisher who supported Bessie Coleman at the beginning, was also buried in Lincoln Cemetery, among many of its Black Chicago notables.
SOURCES:
Bessie Coleman Bold Pilot Who Gave Women Wings, Martha London, 2021, Capstone Press, North Mankato, MN.
Brave Bessie Flying Free, Lillian M. Fisher, 1995, Hendrick Long, Houston, TX.
