Bessie Coleman, Queen Bess, and the Barnstormer Who Crossed an Ocean to Learn What America Would Not Teach Her

Bessie Coleman was the first Black woman in the world to hold a pilot’s license, and the first American woman of any race to earn an international license from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale. When no flight school in the United States would train a Black woman in 1920, she learned French, sailed to France, and earned her wings there on June 15, 1921. She went on to become one of America’s most celebrated barnstormers before her death in 1926.

Who Was Bessie Coleman?

Bessie Coleman grew up in Atlanta, Texas, a small cotton town near the Louisiana line, one of thirteen children. Her father was of mostly Cherokee heritage; her mother picked cotton and took in laundry. As a girl, Bessie picked cotton too.

She was sharp with numbers, quick enough to keep the man weighing the cotton from cheating her family out of a single pound. She read everything she could find, finished all eight grades of her local schoolhouse, and saved laundry money to attend a college in Oklahoma. She lasted one term before the money ran out.

Like many others of her generation, Coleman followed the Great Migration north to Chicago, where her brothers lived. She trained as a manicurist and set up in a barbershop on the South Side, in the heart of Black Chicago.

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

The spark came from her own brother. John Coleman had served in France during World War I, and around 1918 and 1919, as the veterans came home, he liked to tease Bessie that French women were flying real airplanes - something, he said, she would never do.

The idea took hold and would not let go. Coleman began reading everything she could about aviation and listening to returning pilots tell their stories. She decided she was going to fly herself.

But in 1920, there was no flight school in America that would train a Black woman. The schools turned away women, turned away Black students, and had no category at all for someone who was both.

Her breakthrough came through a friend: Robert Abbott, founder of The Chicago Defender, the most powerful Black newspaper in the country. Abbott told her to go to France, where the aviation schools were the best in the world and would put a woman in a cockpit without hesitation. She would need money, and she would need the language.

So Coleman enrolled in night school in Chicago and learned French. She worked and saved, Abbott and another backer helped fund her, and in November 1920 she boarded a ship for France. She could not get an airplane ride in her own country, so she crossed an ocean to earn one.

What Was Bessie Coleman’s Flight Training Like?

Coleman enrolled at one of France’s finest flying schools, run by the Caudron brothers, at Le Crotoy on the coast of the English Channel. Her training aircraft was a Nieuport biplane - a machine of wood, wire, and fabric.

These were unforgiving airplanes. The rotary engine flung castor oil back into the pilot’s face, the controls were crude, and the spinning engine mass made the aircraft shake and pull hard to one side. A moment’s inattention on the rudder could kill you.

The training was dangerous. During her ten months at the school, Coleman watched another student die in a crash in front of her. She wrote that it was a terrible shock - and then she went back up the next day.

On June 15, 1921, the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI) - the same international body that certifies aviation records today - issued Bessie Coleman her pilot’s license. She was the first Black woman in the world to hold one, and the first American woman of any race to hold an international FAI license.

She did not stop there. Coleman stayed in Europe for advanced and stunt instruction, traveling to France, the Netherlands, and Germany to train under pilots who had flown in the war. She wanted to be more than licensed - she wanted to be a showman, because she understood that a license doesn’t change a country, but a spectacle can.

What Made Bessie Coleman “Queen Bess” the Barnstormer?

Coleman returned to the United States in 1922, and the Black press met her at the dock like royalty. They called her Queen Bess, and she went to work as a barnstormer.

Before crowds of thousands - many seeing an airplane up close for the first time in their lives - she flew figure eights, loops, and steep dives she pulled out of low enough to make the crowd gasp. She performed the falling leaf, letting the airplane sideslip down the sky like a scrap of paper before catching it. This was the golden age of barnstorming, when avgas was cheap, airspace was free, and a pilot with nerve and a surplus Curtiss Jenny could draw a crowd in any cow pasture in America.

But Coleman’s shows carried a principle. She refused to perform at any airfield that forced Black spectators to enter through a separate gate.

At a show in Waxahachie, Texas, organizers wanted two entrances - one for white spectators, one for Black spectators. Coleman said no. She insisted on a single gate for everyone who paid, or she would not fly. Since she was the entire reason the crowd had come, the organizers relented, and Black and white Texans walked into that airfield side by side. In 1922, that was a quiet stick of dynamite.

Her larger dream was to open a flight school for Black aviators, so the pilots coming after her would never have to cross an ocean for something that should have been theirs at home. She turned down a Hollywood role that traded on ugly stereotypes because it cost too much in dignity, and she lectured in churches and theaters, showing films of her flying and saving every dollar toward the school.

How Did Bessie Coleman Die?

On April 30, 1926, in Jacksonville, Florida, Coleman was flying a rehearsal for a May Day show scheduled for the next day. She was in a recently purchased - and well-worn - Curtiss Jenny, with her mechanic, a young man named William Wills, flying it from the front seat.

Coleman was in the other seat and had deliberately left her seatbelt off so she could lean out over the side and scout the field for a planned parachute jump. About 3,000 feet up, the airplane suddenly nosed over into a dive and then flipped upside down. Investigators later found that a loose wrench had slid into the control gears and jammed them.

When the Jenny flipped, Bessie Coleman fell. She was 34 years old. Wills died moments later when the aircraft hit the ground and burned.

It wasn’t the loops or the dives that killed her - it was a tool left in the cockpit and a preflight that no one finished. The lesson still taught on the ramp every day holds: clean your cockpit, account for your tools, and wear the belt. The sky does not care how brave you are.

What Is Bessie Coleman’s Legacy?

Coleman lost her life, but her mission did not die with her. Ten thousand people came to her memorial in Chicago.

A few years later, William Powell - a war veteran inspired by her example - founded the Bessie Coleman Aero Club in Los Angeles. From that club and the flying clubs that followed came a generation of Black aviators, part of the movement that eventually put the Tuskegee Airmen into the cockpits of P-51 Mustangs over Europe.

Every year for decades, Black aviators have flown over her grave at Lincoln Cemetery in Chicago and dropped flowers from the air. In 1995, the U.S. Postal Service honored her with a stamp. More recently, the U.S. Mint struck her image on a quarter, and a major American airline named a training program for aspiring pilots after her.

Coleman never got to open her school. But the pioneers don’t fly for themselves - they open a hole in the sky so the rest of us can follow through it. She built the school anyway; it simply took the rest of us a while to finish the hangar.

Key Takeaways

• Bessie Coleman was the first Black woman in the world - and the first American woman of any race - to earn an international pilot’s license, granted by the FAI on June 15, 1921.
• Denied training in the United States, she learned French and sailed to France in November 1920 to study at the Caudron brothers’ school at Le Crotoy.
• As the barnstormer “Queen Bess,” she refused to perform at any venue that segregated its audience, insisting on a single gate for all spectators.
• She died on April 30, 1926, at age 34, when a loose wrench jammed the controls of her Curtiss Jenny - a preventable maintenance failure, not a stunt gone wrong.
• Her dream of a Black flight school inspired the Bessie Coleman Aero Club and helped pave the way for the Tuskegee Airmen; she has since been honored on a U.S. postage stamp (1995) and a U.S. quarter.