Bessie Coleman, Queen Bess, and the Chicago Manicurist Who Sailed to France to Earn the Wings Nobody in America Would Give Her

Bessie Coleman was a Chicago manicurist who, denied entry to every American flight school because she was both Black and a woman, taught herself French, crossed the Atlantic, and on June 15, 1921 became the first Black woman - and first Native American woman - in the world to hold an international pilot’s license. She earned it in France from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI), then came home to barnstorm as “Queen Bess” and fight for a segregation-free path into the sky. This is the story of how she did it, and why aviation still remembers her name.

Who Was Bessie Coleman?

Bessie Coleman was born in 1892 in Atlanta, Texas, a small town in the northeastern corner of the state. She was one of thirteen children. Her father was of Cherokee and African American descent, her mother was African American, and the family were sharecroppers - working land they didn’t own for a share of a crop that mostly went to someone else.

As a girl she picked cotton and walked four miles to a one-room schoolhouse whenever the picking season allowed. But she had a head for numbers and kept the books for the family’s cotton accounts. She wanted more than that town could offer.

She saved enough to attend college in Oklahoma, but the money ran out after a single term. So she followed her brothers north to Chicago, part of the Great Migration of Black families leaving the South in search of something better.

How Did She Get Interested in Flying?

In Chicago, Coleman became a skilled manicurist, working in the White Sox Barber Shop on the city’s South Side, in the heart of Black Chicago. That barbershop is where the flying bug bit her.

Men returning from the First World War would sit in the shop and tell stories about airplanes, dogfights over the trenches, and the view of the world from above. One of her brothers, John, had been overseas and liked to needle her - teasing that French women were better than American women because French women could fly and Bessie never would.

Most people would have let the remark go. Coleman decided instead that she was going to fly - not someday, but for real.

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

Every American flight school turned her away. In 1920, flight schools didn’t want women, and they especially didn’t want Black students. Being both meant there was simply no door for her to walk through - not one American instructor would take her money.

Then she met Robert Abbott, founder of The Chicago Defender, one of the most influential Black newspapers in the country. Abbott gave her the advice that changed everything: if America won’t teach you, go to France, where they’ll train a woman.

So Coleman enrolled in a French-language school in the Chicago Loop, studying at night after work. With her barbershop savings and sponsorship from Abbott and another businessman, she boarded a ship in November 1920 and crossed the Atlantic to learn the one thing her own country insisted she could not do.

Where Did She Train, and What Did She Fly?

Coleman trained at the flying school run by the Caudron brothers in Le Crotoy, on the northern coast of France. She learned on the Nieuport, a biplane whose trainer version used a rotary engine - the wild kind where the entire cylinder block spins with the propeller, throwing oil and dragging the airplane around with its spinning mass. You flew it as much with your feet as your hands.

The training was brutal and genuinely dangerous. During her roughly ten months there, she reportedly witnessed another student die in a crash at the field. She kept flying - long days in an open cockpit, managing the engine by blipping the ignition on and off, with the cold, wet North Sea wind coming in off the coast.

On June 15, 1921, the FAI granted Bessie Coleman her pilot’s license. She was the first Black woman in the world to hold an international pilot’s license, and the first Native American woman as well. She had done it in France, in a language she taught herself, on borrowed money - because home wouldn’t have her.

What Was Barnstorming, and How Did She Make a Living?

Coleman returned to America in the fall of 1921, met at the dock like a hero by the Black press. But a license alone didn’t pay the bills. In that era there were no airlines or corporate flight departments. To fly for money, you barnstormed - traveling town to town with a war-surplus airplane, performing loops, rolls, and spins over county fairgrounds, and charging spectators to watch or ride.

Her French license hadn’t covered stunt flying, so she got back on a boat. She returned to Europe - this time to France, Germany, and the Netherlands - to learn aerobatics from the best stunt pilots and aircraft designers she could find: figure eights, loops, tail spins, and heart-stopping low passes.

She came home the second time in 1922, ready to perform. On September 3, 1922, at Curtiss Field on Long Island, she gave her first public flight exhibition in the United States. The Chicago Defender billed her as “the world’s greatest woman flier,” thousands came to watch, and the crowd gave her the name that stuck: Queen Bess.

Barnstorming was romantic but filthy and hand-to-mouth work. The airplanes smelled of hot oil and dope, the fabric lacquer; the engines left your ears ringing; and the machines were built to be cheap and expendable. Cables frayed and engines quit. In 1923, in California, her Jenny’s engine failed on climb-out and she went down hard, breaking a leg and cracking ribs. From her hospital bed she sent word to her fans: as soon as she could walk, she would fly again. And she did.

What Was Bessie Coleman Fighting For?

What lifts Coleman above simply being “the first” is that she flew with a mission. She refused to perform for segregated crowds. In Waxahachie, Texas, organizers wanted Black and white spectators to enter through separate gates. Coleman said no - she would not fly unless everyone came through the same gate. The grandstand seating stayed segregated, more than she could change in one afternoon, but she forced them to tear down the divided entrance, using the only leverage she had: she was the show, and without her there was no show.

Her deeper dream was a flight school for young Black aviators in America, so the next Bessie Coleman would never have to cross an ocean to reach the sky. She lectured in churches and theaters, showing film of her flying and telling young audiences that the air was the one place with no barriers - if only someone would open the door. She was saving toward that school one exhibition and one lecture at a time.

How Did Bessie Coleman Die?

On April 30, 1926, in Jacksonville, Florida, Coleman went up to scout a field and plan a parachute jump for a benefit exhibition the next day. Her mechanic and publicity man, William Wills, was flying her newly purchased Curtiss Jenny, with Coleman in the other seat.

Because she was planning her jump, Coleman had left her seat belt unfastened and was leaning out over the side to study the ground below. About ten minutes into the flight, at roughly 2,000 feet, the airplane suddenly nosed over, dove, and flipped. A loose wrench had slid forward into the control gears and jammed the controls.

When the plane flipped, Coleman fell from the open cockpit - a fall of about 2,000 feet - and was killed instantly. She was 34 years old. Wills could not recover the aircraft and died in the crash and the fire that followed. The flight school she dreamed of was still just a figure in a savings account.

Ten thousand people attended her memorial in Chicago, where journalist and activist Ida B. Wells presided over the service. Queen Bess was buried in Lincoln Cemetery on the South Side, not far from the barbershop where a brother’s teasing had first lit the spark.

What Is Bessie Coleman’s Legacy?

Coleman’s dream outlived her. In 1929, Black aviator William Powell, inspired by her example, founded the Bessie Coleman Aero Club in Los Angeles to open flying to Black Americans - exactly as she had wanted. For years afterward, Black pilots flew over her grave every Memorial Day and dropped flowers from the air.

You can draw a straight line from Bessie Coleman to the Tuskegee Airmen who flew and fought in the Second World War. She kicked the door open; others walked through it.

The honors have come, too. There is a road at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport named Bessie Coleman Drive. The U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp in her honor in 1995. And in recent years she appeared on the U.S. quarter as part of the American Women series - so it’s entirely possible you’ve carried Queen Bess in your pocket without ever knowing it.

Coleman faced a barrier that had nothing to do with lift, thrust, or the honest physics of flight - the kind that people build. She went around it the hard way: learned a language, crossed an ocean twice, and came home with the wings her own country refused to grant her, then spent every dollar and every breath trying to hold that door open for those who followed.

Key Takeaways

• Bessie Coleman became the first Black woman and first Native American woman in the world to earn an international pilot’s license, granted by the FAI on June 15, 1921, in France.
• She trained abroad because every American flight school rejected her for being both Black and a woman; Chicago Defender founder Robert Abbott urged her to go to France.
• Known as “Queen Bess,” she gave her first U.S. exhibition on September 3, 1922, at Curtiss Field, Long Island, and made a living barnstorming.
• She refused to fly for fully segregated crowds and dreamed of founding a flight school for Black aviators.
• She died in a crash in Jacksonville, Florida, on April 30, 1926, at age 34, when a loose wrench jammed the controls; her legacy helped inspire the Bessie Coleman Aero Club and the Tuskegee Airmen.