Bessie Coleman walked into every flying school in Chicago and was turned away from every one. The year was 1919. No American flight school would accept a student who was both Black and a woman. Most would not accept her for either reason alone. A lesser person would have abandoned the idea. Coleman went home, taught herself French, and moved to Paris.

She enrolled at the École d’Aviation des Frères Caudron in Normandy. She flew in biplanes that had recently served as military trainers in the First World War. The French had no interest in her race or her gender — only whether she could fly. She could. On 15 June 1921, Bessie Coleman received her international pilot’s licence from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, becoming the first Black woman — and first person of Native American descent — in the world to hold one.

She returned to the United States a celebrity. Black newspapers celebrated her as a hero. White newspapers largely ignored her. She performed airshows across the American South — refusing to perform at venues with segregated entrances, insisting that Black and white spectators enter through the same gate. At a time when Jim Crow laws governed daily life in much of America, this was not a small gesture. She used the stage the sky gave her to push back against the world below.

A Dream Bigger Than Airshows

Coleman’s dream was to open a flying school for Black Americans — a place that would never turn away a student for their race. She saved money from her performances, lectured at churches and schools, charged audiences to hear her speak, and slowly accumulated enough to start planning. She needed one more big performance to put her over the financial threshold.

On 30 April 1926, she was performing a test flight in Jacksonville, Florida, in a Curtiss JN-4 piloted by her mechanic and manager William Wills. Wills lost control of the aircraft when a wrench that had been left loose in the cockpit jammed the controls. At 3,500 feet, the Jenny lurched into a nosedive and rolled. Coleman — who was not wearing a seatbelt, preparing to survey the terrain for the next day’s parachute jump — was thrown from the aircraft. She was 34 years old. The school never opened.

Her funeral in Chicago drew 10,000 mourners. Ida B. Wells — the great civil rights journalist — spoke at the service. The Bessie Coleman Aero Club, founded after her death, trained the next generation of Black aviators. Among those it inspired: the Tuskegee Airmen, the legendary fighter pilots who would go on to escort American bombers over Europe during World War II, and who never lost a bomber they escorted. The chain that Bessie Coleman started in a French flying school in 1921 reached all the way to the skies over Germany in 1944.

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