Bassie Coleman

Overview

Bessie Coleman was born in Texas in 1892, one of 13 children in a family with African American and Native American roots. She grew up picking cotton and helping her mother wash laundry for customers, and she later moved to Chicago, where she worked as a manicurist. When her brother teased her that women in France flew airplanes, she decided she would fly too, but no flight school in the United States would accept a Black woman. With encouragement from Robert Abbott, publisher of the Chicago Defender newspaper, she learned French and trained at a flight school in France. On June 15, 1921, she became the first African American woman, and the first woman of Native American descent, to earn a pilot’s license. Back in the United States, she became a barnstormer, performing daring stunts at air shows, and crowds called her “Brave Bessie.” She died in 1926, at age 34, in a plane crash during a practice flight before a show.

Why She Matters: 

Bessie Coleman refused to let unfair rules decide what she could do. When American schools turned her away, she found another path, learning a new language and crossing an ocean to reach her goal. She also stood up for fairness on the ground. She would perform only for crowds that were not segregated, and at a show in Waxahachie, the Texas town where she grew up, she demanded that Black and white fans enter through the same gate. She dreamed of opening a flight school for Black Americans, and after her death, aviator William Powell founded the Bessie Coleman Aero Club in her honor. Her story shows that when one door closes, determination can open another.