Bessie Coleman and the woman who crossed an ocean just to learn how to fly

Bessie Coleman became the first African American woman and first Native American woman to hold a pilot’s license in 1921 — but she didn’t earn it in the United States. Not a single American flight school would accept her. She taught herself French, sailed to France, and learned to fly in a World War I-era biplane on a former battlefield. Her story is one of the most remarkable in all of aviation.

Who Was Bessie Coleman?

Bessie Coleman was born in 1892 in Atlanta, Texas, one of thirteen children. Her father was part Choctaw, part Black. Her mother was African American. The family picked cotton. Bessie walked four miles each day to a one-room segregated schoolhouse, and when harvest season came, school stopped because children were needed in the fields.

Around 1915, Coleman moved to Chicago as part of the Great Migration and found work as a manicurist in a barbershop on the South Side. It was there that her brother John Coleman, a World War I veteran, told her about French women who could fly airplanes. He teased her about it — told her French women were better than her because they could fly and she couldn’t.

That teasing lit a fuse.

Why Did Bessie Coleman Go to France to Learn to Fly?

In 1920, seventeen years after the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, barnstormers were crisscrossing the country and the airplane was the most exciting machine on earth. Yet not one flight school in the United States would teach a Black woman to fly.

Coleman sought help from Robert Abbott, founder and publisher of the Chicago Defender, one of the most important Black newspapers in the country. Abbott told her the truth: no American school would take her, but France would.

So a manicurist from Chicago’s South Side who had never traveled far from home taught herself French by taking night classes after work. She saved every penny. Abbott and other sponsors helped fund the trip. In November 1920, she boarded a ship and crossed the Atlantic.

Training in France: The Nieuport 28

Coleman enrolled at the École d’Aviation des Frères Caudron in Le Crotoy, northern France. The airfield sat on flat marshland near the Somme — ground that had been soaked in the blood of World War I just years earlier.

She trained in a Nieuport 28, a biplane with a rotary engine, open cockpit, no electrical system, and no real brakes. The controls were a stick and a rudder bar. The instruments were your eyeballs and your inner ear. Pilots flew by feel and by the sound of the wires in the wind.

Coleman was 28 years old, thousands of miles from home, flying an aircraft made of wood, fabric, and wire, with a French instructor shouting over engine noise. She watched a fellow student die in a training crash. She kept flying.

On June 15, 1921, Bessie Coleman earned her Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI) pilot’s license — the international standard, recognized worldwide. She was the first Black woman in the world and the first person of Native American descent to hold one.

Queen Bess Comes Home

Robert Abbott and the Chicago Defender made Coleman’s return a national event. The press dubbed her “Queen Bess,” and the name stuck. Reporters met her at the dock when she arrived in New York in September 1921.

But Coleman had ambitions beyond personal fame. She wanted to barnstorm — to perform before crowds, to be seen. And she had a larger plan: to open a flight school for Black Americans. She wanted to do for others what no one in America had been willing to do for her.

She returned to Europe for advanced training in France, Germany, and the Netherlands, learning aerobatic maneuvers: figure eights, loops, and near-vertical dives.

Barnstorming and Breaking Barriers

Coleman’s first American air show took place on September 3, 1922, at Curtiss Field on Long Island near Garden City, New York. Thousands attended. She flew borrowed airplanes, performed wing walks, made parachute jumps, and flew low, fast, and inverted. The crowds went wild.

She barnstormed across the country — Texas, California, Illinois, Tennessee — flying old surplus Curtiss JN-4 “Jennies” and whatever else she could get. But Coleman was more than a performer. She was an activist.

Coleman refused to perform at any venue that segregated its audience. She would not fly if Black spectators had to use a separate entrance from white spectators. She insisted on a single gate for everyone. In Houston, promoters agreed to integrate the entrance but wanted separate seating. Coleman negotiated and held firm on the gate. It was a crack in the wall, and she put it there.

She gave lectures at churches, schools, and theaters. She showed films of her flights. She believed flying was freedom, and she believed freedom should not have a color line.

The Crash in Santa Monica and the Struggle for Funding

In 1923, Coleman bought her first airplane — a surplus Curtiss JN-4D. On her first flight in her own aircraft in Santa Monica, California, the engine failed at about 300 feet. The Jenny went down. Coleman was pulled from the wreckage with a broken leg, cracked ribs, and cuts across her face. She spent three months in the hospital.

She went back to flying as soon as she could walk.

Money was a constant struggle. Barnstorming paid, but not much and not reliably. She gave lectures, worked odd jobs, and turned down a film role when the script required her to appear in rags and portray a racial stereotype. The paycheck would have helped. She refused it anyway, saying she would not appear on screen in a way that demeaned her people.

How Did Bessie Coleman Die?

By 1926, Coleman was planning a major show in Jacksonville, Florida for May 1 — May Day. On the evening of April 30, 1926, she and her mechanic and publicist William Wills took a Curtiss JN-4 up for a test flight over Paxon Field. The airplane had been flown hard by several previous owners and had a troubling mechanical history.

Coleman sat in the rear cockpit. She was scouting the terrain for a planned parachute jump and had not fastened her seatbelt so she could lean over the side. Wills flew from the front seat. They climbed to about 3,500 feet.

The airplane went into a dive, then a spin. The best evidence suggests a wrench or tool slid into the control linkages and jammed them. The Jenny rolled inverted. Coleman, unbuckled, fell from the cockpit.

She fell 2,000 feet. William Wills could not recover the airplane and was killed on impact.

Bessie Coleman was 34 years old. She never got to open her flight school.

Bessie Coleman’s Legacy

Her death was front-page news in Black newspapers nationwide. Thousands filed past her coffin in Jacksonville, Orlando, and Chicago. Ida B. Wells, the legendary journalist and civil rights leader, organized the Chicago funeral service. Ten thousand people attended.

The dream did not die with her:

William J. Powell, a Black aviator inspired by Coleman, founded the Bessie Coleman Aero Club in Los Angeles in 1929 and wrote Black Wings to encourage African Americans to pursue aviation.
Mae Jemison, the first African American woman astronaut, has cited Bessie Coleman as an inspiration.
In 1995, the United States Postal Service issued a Bessie Coleman commemorative stamp.
Every year on the anniversary of her death, pilots from Chicago fly over her grave at Lincoln Cemetery and drop flowers.

Coleman never had more than a few hundred dollars to her name. She never owned a house. She owned one airplane, and it nearly killed her the first time she flew it. She crossed an ocean to learn something that should have been available to her at home — and spent every remaining day of her life trying to open that door for others.

Key Takeaways

Bessie Coleman earned her FAI pilot’s license on June 15, 1921, in France, after every U.S. flight school refused to train her because of her race and gender.
She was the first African American woman and first Native American woman in the world to hold a pilot’s license.
Coleman used her barnstorming career to fight segregation, refusing to perform at venues with separate entrances for Black and white spectators.
Her lifelong goal — a flight school for Black Americans — was never realized in her lifetime but inspired generations of aviators who followed.
She died on April 30, 1926, at age 34, in a test flight accident in Jacksonville, Florida.

Sources for further reading include Doris Rich’s biography Queen Bess and the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum archives.