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

Bessie Coleman earned her Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI) pilot’s license on June 15, 1921, becoming the first African American woman and first Native American woman in the world to hold a pilot’s license. No American flight school would accept her, so she taught herself French, sailed to Europe, and learned to fly in the war-scarred fields of northern France. Her life was a refusal to accept boundaries that had nothing to do with ability and everything to do with fear.

From Cotton Fields to Chicago’s South Side

Bessie Coleman was born January 26, 1892, in Atlanta, Texas, one of thirteen children in a family of sharecroppers. Her father was part Choctaw and part Black; her mother was African American. Bessie walked four miles each way to a one-room segregated school. When she was nine, her father left for Indian Territory in Oklahoma, seeking better standing for a man with Native heritage. Her mother stayed behind with the children.

Bessie did laundry for other families to save money for college. She made it one semester at the Oklahoma Colored Agricultural and Normal University in Langston before the money ran out.

She eventually moved to Chicago, where she worked as a manicurist in a barbershop on the South Side. Her brother John, who had served in France during World War I, would taunt her about how French women could do anything — including fly airplanes — while American women, especially Black women, were never even considered.

That challenge changed everything.

Every Flight School Said No

Bessie decided to become a pilot. She approached flight schools across Chicago, and every single one turned her away — not for lack of money or aptitude, but because she was a Black woman in 1918 America.

She sought out Robert Abbott, publisher of the Chicago Defender, then the most influential Black newspaper in the country. Abbott saw something in this young woman from Texas who refused to accept the word “no.” His advice was direct: go to France. France had welcomed Black soldiers and artists. France had female aviators. France did not care about the color of a student’s skin.

So Bessie Coleman, still working at the barbershop, enrolled in night classes at a Berlitz school and taught herself French. She saved every dime. An entire country had told her the sky was off-limits, and she found a different country.

Learning to Fly in War-Scarred France

In November 1920, Coleman sailed for France and enrolled at the Caudron Brothers aviation school at Le Crotoy, in the Somme region. The field was muddy. Cold wind blew off the English Channel. Her training aircraft was a Nieuport 82, a biplane with a rotary engine notorious for dangerous torque on takeoff. The landing gear was barely more than bicycle parts. The wings were fabric stretched over wood.

Her classmates were mostly French men, some of whom had never seen a Black woman before. Coleman focused on the rudder pedals, the stick, and the sound of the Le Rhône rotary engine spinning up.

During training, she watched a fellow student die in a crash. She went back to flying the next day.

Seven months later, on June 15, 1921, she held her FAI license — a credential recognized internationally. She was the first Black woman and first Native American woman on the planet to earn one. She had to leave her own country to do it.

Queen Bess and the Barnstorming Circuit

Coleman returned home to a hero’s welcome in the Black press. The mainstream aviation world largely ignored her.

She turned to barnstorming — the primary way pilots outside the airmail service made a living in the early 1920s. Wing walking, parachute drops, loops, dives, crowd-pleasing spectacle flying. Coleman excelled at all of it. She billed herself as “Queen Bess, the World’s Greatest Woman Flier,” performing in a custom military-style uniform, polished boots, and a leather flying helmet.

She drew enormous crowds across the American South and Midwest — Houston, Dallas, Memphis, Chicago. Black families drove for hours to see her. She was more than entertainment. She was proof that the boundaries society drew had nothing to do with ability.

The Principle That Defined Her

Coleman had a non-negotiable rule that reveals her character more than any aerial maneuver: she refused to perform at any venue that segregated its audience. If Black spectators had to enter through a separate gate, she would not fly. She insisted on a single entrance for everyone.

This was 1922 Texas. Promoters fought her. She held her ground. Sometimes she won; sometimes she lost the booking. She would not stage a show that told her own people they were less than.

The Dream of a Flight School

Coleman’s ambition extended far beyond barnstorming. She wanted to open a flight school for Black aviators — to give others the chance that had been denied to her. Every dollar from shows, speaking fees, and newspaper appearances was funneled toward that goal.

She returned to France for advanced training with some of Europe’s best stunt pilots, coming home with skills that placed her among the top exhibition flyers in America.

But the airplanes she could afford were old — surplus Curtiss Jennys, war-weary trainers that had already lived hard lives. Maintenance was a constant worry, money always tight. Barnstorming in the 1920s was dangerous for everyone; the accident rate was horrific.

On February 4, 1923, her engine failed during a flight in Santa Monica, California. The Curtiss Jenny went down. She survived but broke her leg, cracked three ribs, and fractured her face. She spent three months in the hospital.

She came back.

The Final Flight

April 30, 1926. Jacksonville, Florida. Coleman was preparing for an airshow the next day. Her mechanic and publicist, William Wills, was flying a recently purchased Curtiss Jenny that had been ferried from Dallas. The airplane already had a troubled history — it had force-landed once during the ferry flight due to mechanical problems.

Wills sat in the front cockpit. Coleman rode in the rear without a seatbelt, needing to lean over the side to scout the parachute drop zone for the next day’s show. At roughly 3,000 feet, the airplane entered a dive and then a spin. A wrench or tool had slid into the control linkages and jammed the mechanism. Wills could not recover. Coleman was thrown from the open cockpit.

She was 34 years old.

The Legacy She Left Behind

The flight school dream did not die with her. In 1929, William J. Powell, inspired directly by Coleman, founded the Bessie Coleman Aero Club in Los Angeles. Black aviators began to organize, train, and fly. The Tuskegee Airmen, who would reshape military aviation two decades later, flew in the wake she left behind. Every Black pilot who has ever strapped into a cockpit owes something to the woman who crossed an ocean to find someone willing to teach her.

At O’Hare in Chicago, every year on the anniversary of her death, pilots fly over her grave in Lincoln Cemetery and drop flowers. They have been doing it since 1937.

The primary sources for this history include the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum archives and Doris Rich’s biography, Queen Bess, the definitive account of Coleman’s life.

Key Takeaways

• Bessie Coleman earned the first pilot’s license held by a Black woman or Native American woman anywhere in the world, receiving her FAI license on June 15, 1921, after training in France because no American flight school would accept her.
• She taught herself French and sailed to Europe at her own expense, enrolling at the Caudron Brothers school and training in a Nieuport 82 biplane alongside French military veterans.
• Coleman refused to perform at segregated venues, insisting on a single entrance for all spectators — a stand she took in the Jim Crow South of the early 1920s.
• Her goal was always larger than personal fame: she devoted her barnstorming earnings toward founding a flight school for Black aviators, a dream cut short by her death at 34 but carried forward by others she inspired.
• Her influence reaches directly to the Tuskegee Airmen and every generation of Black aviators that followed, making her one of the most consequential figures in American aviation history.