Bessie Coleman, Queen Bess, and the Black Barnstormer Who Crossed an Ocean to Get the License America Wouldn't Give Her

Bessie Coleman became the first Black woman and first Native American woman in the world to earn a pilot’s license, which she received from France’s Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI) on June 15, 1921. American flight schools refused to train her because she was Black and a woman, so she learned French, saved her money, and sailed to France to earn the credential her own country denied her. She went on to become a celebrated barnstormer known as “Queen Bess” who refused to perform for segregated audiences.

Who Was Bessie Coleman?

Bessie Coleman was born in 1902 near Atlanta, Texas, in the northeastern corner of the state. She was one of thirteen children. Her father was of mostly Native American descent and her mother was Black, and the family worked as cotton pickers.

Coleman had a gift for numbers and kept the books for the family’s cotton earnings. She completed one term at a college in Oklahoma before the money ran out and she returned to the fields.

Around the time of the First World War, she moved north to Chicago to live with her brothers. She found work as a manicurist in a South Side barbershop, in the heart of Black Chicago - and that barbershop is where her aviation dream took hold.

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

Coleman’s brothers had served in France during the war. When her brother John returned, he teased her that French women could do something she never could: fly airplanes. Instead of laughing it off, Coleman decided she would learn to fly.

The timing seemed perfect. Just after the war, surplus military aircraft like the Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny” were cheap and plentiful, and barnstormers crisscrossed the country. Flight instruction was widely available - unless you were a Black woman.

Every American flight school turned her down, not for lack of ability but because of her race and her gender. With the encouragement of Robert Abbott, founder of the Chicago Defender, she concluded she would have to train abroad. She took night classes to learn French, worked a second job, saved every dollar, and sailed for France in the fall of 1920.

Where Did Bessie Coleman Learn to Fly?

Coleman enrolled at the Caudron Brothers’ School of Aviation at Le Crotoy, on the northern coast of France near the Somme. She trained on a Nieuport, an early French biplane - a demanding stick-and-wire machine with a rotary engine that misted castor oil back into the pilot’s face.

She trained through a bitter French winter along the Channel coast. The flying was genuinely dangerous; during her training, she witnessed a fellow student die in a crash at the field. She kept flying.

On June 15, 1921, the FAI awarded her its internationally recognized pilot’s license. That credential was honored worldwide, making her the first Black woman and first Native American woman to hold one. Notably, she earned her international license two full years before Amelia Earhart earned hers.

How Did Bessie Coleman Become a Barnstormer?

A basic license wasn’t enough for what Coleman wanted: to be a professional show pilot. No one in America would teach her stunt flying either, so she returned to Europe and spent months training in France, Germany, and the Netherlands, including instruction associated with the outfit of Dutch aircraft designer Anthony Fokker. She mastered loops, figure eights, tailspins, and low passes.

She debuted at an airfield on Long Island in September 1922, at an air show honoring the Black veterans of the 369th’s “Harlem Hellfighters” (the 15th New York National Guard). Thousands came to watch her roll, loop, and dive a Curtiss Jenny over the field.

Crowds named her “Queen Bess” and “the world’s greatest woman flier.” For the next several years she barnstormed across the country, drawing large crowds of both Black and white spectators - itself a radical act in 1920s America.

What Did Bessie Coleman Stand For?

Coleman had a rule she would not break. When offered lucrative shows in front of segregated crowds where Black spectators entered through a separate gate, she refused to fly unless everyone used the same gate and sat where they pleased. As the headline draw, she had the leverage to enforce it.

She also turned down a Hollywood movie role when she learned her character was written to appear ragged and ignorant, playing to demeaning stereotypes. She walked away from the money rather than degrade her people.

Her deeper goal was to open a flight school for Black aviators, so no one after her would have to cross an ocean to learn to fly. She funneled her barnstorming earnings toward that dream and lectured at Black churches, theaters, and schools, telling young people the sky belonged to them.

How Did Bessie Coleman Die?

By the spring of 1926, Coleman was in Jacksonville, Florida, preparing for a show on May 1. A young mechanic and pilot named William Wills had flown her recently purchased Jenny down from Texas, but the worn, poorly maintained aircraft had given him trouble the entire trip, including forced landings.

On April 30, 1926, the two went up to scout the field for a planned parachute jump. Wills was flying; Coleman, at about 2,000 feet, had removed her seatbelt and leaned out over the side of the open cockpit to study the ground below.

The airplane suddenly nosed into a dive and then a spin. Investigators later determined a loose wrench had slid into the controls and jammed the gearbox. As the aircraft flipped, the unbelted Coleman was thrown from the cockpit and fell to her death. She was 34 years old. Wills died moments later when the plane crashed.

What Is Bessie Coleman’s Legacy?

Coleman never got to build her school, but her trail stayed open. Ten thousand mourners attended her Chicago memorial, where crusading journalist Ida B. Wells presided.

A few years after her death, William Powell founded the Bessie Coleman Aero Club in Los Angeles to bring Black Americans into aviation. Black pilots began an annual tradition of flying over her Chicago grave and dropping flowers from the air. Some aviators inspired by her went on to become Tuskegee Airmen in the Second World War.

Her honors continue today: a Bessie Coleman Drive at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, a U.S. Postal Service stamp, and a U.S. Mint quarter bearing her image, so children can find Queen Bess in their pocket change and ask who she was.

For further reading, the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum holds strong material on her life, as do the archives of the Chicago Defender, along with several solid biographies.

Key Takeaways

• Bessie Coleman earned the first pilot’s license held by a Black woman or Native American woman, awarded by France’s FAI on June 15, 1921 - two years before Amelia Earhart’s.
• American flight schools refused to train her, so she learned French and crossed the Atlantic to earn her license, then returned to Europe to master stunt flying.
• As the barnstormer “Queen Bess,” she refused to perform for segregated audiences and turned down a demeaning film role.
• Her dream was a flight school for Black aviators; though she died in a 1926 crash at age 34, others carried the dream forward, helping inspire the Tuskegee Airmen.
• Coleman is memorialized today with a road at O’Hare, a postage stamp, and a U.S. quarter.