The High-Flying Feats of Bessie Coleman

Bessie Coleman was always spunky. After reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin in childhood, she was outraged by the racism toward African Americans, according to Doris Rich’s Queen Bess: Daredevil Aviator. “I’ll never be a Topsy or an Uncle Tom,” she vowed, seething over the characters’ portraits as docile slaves. Years later, when she became a pilot, she declared she intended to “make Uncle Tom’s cabin into a hangar for a flying school.”

Born in a one-room cabin on January 26, 1892, in Waxahachie, Texas, Coleman was one of thirteen children. Her father George, a farmer with Native American roots, abandoned the family in 1901, leaving her mother Susan to support her children as a cook and housekeeper for a white family. Coleman attended school through the 8th grade, where she was a star math student. She was also a voracious reader, thanks to her mother’s encouragement. After leaving school, she worked as a laundress. By 1915, Coleman bought a ticket on the “colored side” of a train and moved to Chicago for better opportunities, according to Rich. There she lived with her brother Walter, attended a beauty school, and became a manicurist. On January 30, 1917, she quietly married Claude Glenn, an older Black man and friend of her brother Walter, but mysteriously never lived with him.

By then, post-war improvements in airplane design and technology made flying the era’s most glamorous occupation. The idea of becoming a pilot not only thrilled Coleman but also fueled her desire to improve attitudes toward African Americans. “I knew the Race needed to be represented…so I thought it my duty to risk my life to learn aviating…and encourage flying among the men and women of the Race who are so far behind white men in this special line,” she later explained. Her applications to American flying schools were all rejected because she was a Black woman.

Still, Coleman refused to be discouraged, especially after her brothers Walter and John, veterans of World War I, described seeing French women flying planes. Coleman subsequently studied French and applied for a year’s educational visa in France. After her arrival there in late 1920, she was accepted as a student at the prestigious Ecole d’Aviation des Frères Caudron in Le Crotoy. There she learned the rudiments of flying along with showy stunts like “tail spins, banking and looping the loop.” Seven months later she passed the test to obtain a license from the Federation Aeronautique Internationale – then the only agency granting pilots the right to fly anywhere in the world. That made Coleman the first American of any gender or race to obtain an international license as a pilot.

News of her achievements spread quickly, and when Coleman arrived in New York in September 1921, reporters clamored for interviews. Coleman embraced celebrityhood as easily as she soared through the skies. According to the Air Service News, this “twenty-four-year-old Negro woman” had returned “as a full-fledged aviatrix, the first of her race.” (Like many public personalities, Coleman had lied about her age and was actually 29.)

The cast and producers of Broadway’s hit Black musical Shuffle Along were so awed that they invited her as the guest of honor at a performance and presented her with a loving cup. After a second trip to Europe, she returned to the United States and barnstormed across the nation, dazzling audiences with aerial stunts. During her travels she encouraged Black men and women to become pilots and open their own aviation schools.

One of her proudest moments was her performance in a Curtiss Jenny before 2,000 spectators at the Chicago Checkerboard Airdrome in 1922. Seven years earlier, that city had blocked her hopes to become a schoolteacher because she was Black. Now, the Black weekly, The Chicago Defender, had proclaimed her “Queen Bess Daredevil Aviatrix,” which meant, according to Rich, she’d “shown them all.”

Hollywood, too, was so impressed that the producers of a movie offered her a starring role. But when Coleman discovered she was to play an ignorant southern woman, she stomped off the set. “No Uncle Tom stuff for me,” she declared.

It was a courageous decision, especially since she had no other contract or sponsor. Nevertheless, Coleman kept flying. Finally, through donations from fans and influential friends, she bought a military surplus Curtiss JN-4. On February 4, 1923, to celebrate the opening of a fairground in Palomar Park, Los Angeles, she flew in her new plane from the Santa Monica airport. But at 300 feet, the motor stalled and the plane crashed. Miraculously, Coleman survived with a broken leg, cracked ribs, and cuts on her face. Refusing to be discouraged, she telegrammed her friends, “Tell them all that as soon as I can walk, I’m going to fly! And my faith in aviation and the useful of it will service in fulfilling the destiny of my people isn’t shaken at all.”

Once recovered, Coleman continued performing and advocating for racial equity. In Houston on June 19, 1925 (the anniversary of the day that Texas freed the last enslaved African Americans), she astonished audiences by soaring into the sky with heart-stopping figure eights, barrel rolls, and loop-the-loops. Later at an air show in Wharton, Texas, when the parachute jumper became ill, Coleman agreed to substitute. Once the plane reached 3,000 feet, she left the cockpit, walked out onto the wing’s catwalk, jumped off, and landed to wild applause from the audience.

Despite the fame Coleman achieved for her aerial stunts, they remained secondary to her anti-racist campaign. While preparing for an air show in her hometown Waxahachie and learning there would be separate entrances and seats for whites and Blacks, she refused to perform until that was changed. Ultimately the managers agreed to one entrance but insisted upon segregated seating. “This time Bessie had to give in. She needed the money from the show and the passenger rides that would follow to pay for her new airplane at Love Field,” biographer Rich explains.

Later after lecturing in Georgia and Florida, where she finally made her home, Coleman continued her battle to defend the rights of Blacks. Having discovered that only white people were allowed to attend her parachute jump in Tampa, Florida, she threatened to withdraw from the show. That time Coleman won when Tampa’s Chamber of Commerce agreed to let African Americans attend her performance.

But Coleman’s life was about to meet its tragic end. After purchasing a used two-seater Jenny in Dallas, she asked 23-year-old mechanic William D. Wills to bring the plane to Jacksonville for a May 1^st parachute jump. During a practice flight on April 28, Wills flew the plane from the front cockpit while Coleman sat in the rear so she could spot good locations for the jump. That meant she had to take her seat belt off in order to peer over the edge of the plane. Suddenly, at 3,000 feet, a loose wrench became stuck in the engine and the plane flipped over, hurtling 34-year-old Coleman to her death. The crash also killed Wills, whose body remained in the craft.

Friends and fans across the country were shocked. Thousands, including Congressman Oscar De Priest and anti-segregation attorney Earl B. Dickerson attended the funeral in Chicago, which was presided over by author and equal rights advocate Ida B. Wells. “This girl was one hundred years ahead of the Race she loved so well and by whom she was least appreciated,” pastor Junius C. Austin said during his funeral oration. An editorial in the African-American Dallas Express observed, “There is reason to believe that “the general public did not completely sense the size of her contribution to the achievements of the race.” The  Norfolk Journal and Guide wrote, “Whether they take to it or not, Miss Coleman has taught our women that they can navigate the air, and, like all pioneers, she has built her own monument.”

Coleman’s achievements are still remembered. For decades after her death, the Challenger Pilots Association, a group of Black pioneering aviators, flew over Chicago’s Lincoln Cemetery and dropped flowers on her grave. In 1995, the U.S. government issued a stamp in her honor, and in 2023, the U.S. Mint issued a Bessie Coleman quarter in their American Women Quarters series. Mae Jemison, the first African American astronaut and crew member of the Space Shuttle Endeavor, admitted that she didn’t know about Coleman until she was preparing for the space flight. “Then again, she said, “I think she was there with me all the time.”