Bessie Coleman: The First Black Female Pilot in America and the Racism That Sent Her to France to Learn How to Fly

Bessie Coleman wanted to fly planes. Every flight school in the United States refused to admit her because she was Black. Some refused because she was also a woman. The combination was apparently too much for American aviation to tolerate in 1920.

So she taught herself French, saved enough money to travel, sailed to Paris, and enrolled at the Caudron Brothers’ School of Aviation in Le Crotoy. She earned her international pilot’s license on June 15, 1921, in seven months, becoming the first Black woman and first person of Native American descent to do so anywhere in the world.

She was 29, and prior to this, had been a manicurist in Chicago. Her country had told her no, so she went somewhere that told her yes.

Where She Came From

Coleman was born in 1892 in Waxahachie, Texas, the tenth of twelve children in a sharecropper family. Her mother was Black, her father was Black and Cherokee. She walked four miles to school each day, excelled at math, and managed one semester of college before the money ran out. She eventually followed siblings north to Chicago during the Great Migration and worked as a manicurist.

In Chicago she started meeting veterans coming back from World War I, some of them pilots, and the stories of what they had seen and done took hold of her. Her brother John had served in France and taunted her about it. French women could fly, he said. She’d never be able to do something like that.

She later said: “That’s it. You just called it for me.” She applied to flight schools. Every one rejected her. Robert Abbott, the founder of the Chicago Defender, advised her to look to France, where race and gender were not the same barriers. She learned French, saved money, obtained sponsorships, and left.

What She Did After

When Coleman returned to the United States in September 1921, she had her international license but discovered fairly quickly that commercial aviation was not yet a reliable income source. She decided to make a living as a barnstormer, performing aerial stunts at shows. She was good at it. Press coverage called her “Brave Bessie” and “Queen Bess.” She performed loops, figure eights, and parachute jumps.

She also discovered that she still couldn’t find a flight instructor in the US willing to work with her. So she went back to France in early 1922 for advanced training, then spent time in Germany flying with military aces before returning again. She was building the skills she needed for something beyond barnstorming.

Her actual goal was to open a flight school for Black Americans. She refused to perform at venues that segregated the audience, which cost her appearances but reflected who she was. She fundraised, she toured, she lectured. On top of that, she told audiences that there were no barriers if they were willing to work hard enough, which was the kind of thing someone who had crossed the Atlantic to get a pilot’s license could say with genuine authority.

What Happened

On April 30, 1926, Coleman was rehearsing for an airshow in Jacksonville, Florida. She was a passenger in a plane piloted by her mechanic, William Wills, doing a reconnaissance flight over the show site. The plane went into a sudden nosedive and rolled. Coleman, who was not wearing a seatbelt so she could lean out and check the ground conditions, was thrown from the aircraft. She died on impact. She was 34 years old. Wills died when the plane crashed.