Bessie Coleman, Queen Bess, and the Farm Girl From Texas Who Sailed to France to Earn the License No One in America Would Give Her

Bessie Coleman was the first Black woman and the first Native American woman in the world to earn a pilot’s license, which she received on June 15, 1921. Denied entry to every flight school in the United States because she was Black and a woman, she taught herself French, sailed to France, and earned the internationally recognized license issued by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI) - making her the first American of any background to hold that credential. She went on to become one of the most celebrated stunt pilots of the 1920s barnstorming era before her death in 1926.

Who Was Bessie Coleman?

Bessie Coleman was born in 1892 in a one-room, dirt-floor cabin in Atlanta, Texas, deep in cotton country. She was the tenth of thirteen children. Her mother picked cotton and took in laundry, and her father - of mixed Black and Cherokee heritage - left for the Indian Territory in Oklahoma while Bessie was still a girl, seeking better prospects than Texas offered a man of color at the time.

Her childhood was hard and rural. She walked four miles each way to a one-room schoolhouse, and when cotton season arrived the school closed and everyone went to the fields. Bessie had a gift for numbers and kept the books when the family’s cotton was weighed, catching the man at the scale whenever he tried to shortchange them.

She saved every dollar she could and completed one year of college in Oklahoma before the money ran out and she returned home. That single year was all she could afford, but it awakened an ambition that never left her.

How Did Bessie Coleman Get Into Aviation?

Around 1915, Coleman moved north to Chicago as part of the Great Migration, settling in with her brothers and training as a manicurist. She took a job in a barbershop in the South Side’s busy Black business district - a place where men gathered and talked.

By 1918 and 1919, soldiers were returning from the Great War in France, and some had seen combat aviation firsthand. Her brother John, who had served overseas, teased her that French women were superior to American women because French women could fly airplanes and she could not. He meant it as a joke. Bessie took it as a challenge.

When she set out to learn to fly in 1920, she discovered that not a single American flight school would accept her. She was turned away for being Black and turned away for being a woman, often by people happy to do both at once.

Why Did Bessie Coleman Go to France?

The turning point came through Robert Abbott, founder of The Chicago Defender, one of the most influential Black newspapers in the country. Abbott advised her that if America would not teach her, she should go to France, where the world’s leading aviation program would judge her by her flying rather than her skin color.

There was one obstacle: she spoke no French. So Coleman took a second job managing a chili parlor to raise money and enrolled in a French-language school in Chicago, studying at night after full days of work.

In November 1920, she sailed for France. She enrolled at the flying school run by the Caudron brothers, aircraft builders and aviators in the north of the country.

What Was It Like to Learn to Fly in 1920?

Coleman trained on an early Nieuport biplane - wood, wire, and fabric, with no effective brakes and a rotary engine that sprayed castor oil back into the pilot’s face and tried to torque the aircraft off the runway on every takeoff. Some of these trainers were flown with a stick between the knees and a steel bar for a rudder, with no radio and virtually no instruments.

Pilots flew by feel. If the engine quit - and rotary engines quit often - the only option was to pick a field, glide to it, and hope to miss the fence posts.

She trained through the winter, and during that time she witnessed a fellow student die in a fatal crash at the school. She returned to the field the next morning and kept flying.

On June 15, 1921, Bessie Coleman earned her pilot’s license from the FAI, the international governing body and the gold standard worldwide. Amelia Earhart would not earn hers for another two years. Coleman became the first American of any background - man or woman - to hold an international FAI license, as well as the first Black woman and the first Native American woman in the world to be a licensed pilot.

Consider the arc: a cotton picker’s daughter from a dirt-floor cabin, who could afford only one year of college and whom no one in her own country would teach, earned the highest flying credential on Earth - in a foreign language.

What Did Bessie Coleman Do After Earning Her License?

Coleman stayed in Europe to gain more instruction, training in France, the Netherlands, and Germany with some of the best pilots in the world. She understood that to make a living flying in America, she would have to perform - to loop, roll, and put on a show crowds would pay to see.

When she returned to New York in 1922, the press was waiting and dubbed her “Queen Bess” and “Brave Bessie.” She joined the dangerous, thrilling world of 1920s barnstorming, flying surplus warbirds - mostly the Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny” - from one field to the next. Barnstorming shows featured loops, spins, wing walkers, and parachute jumps, and drew crowds by the thousands. The mortality rate was high.

Coleman became a star attraction, flying figure eights, loops, and dives that pulled gasps from the grandstands. She also lectured in theaters and halls, telling audiences - especially young Black men and women - that the sky was open to them regardless of their background.

Bessie Coleman’s Stand Against Segregation

Coleman’s principles were as firm as her flying. Offered lucrative airshow dates in the South, she learned the promoters intended to run two separate gates - one for white attendees and one for Black attendees. She refused to fly unless everyone entered through the same gate, putting her paycheck on the line in the segregated South of the 1920s.

Her larger ambition was to open a flight school for Black aviators in America, so that no one else would ever have to cross an ocean to learn to fly. She funneled her barnstorming earnings toward that goal.

The road was violent. In 1923, her Jenny’s engine failed at about 300 feet over California and she crashed hard, breaking a leg and several ribs. From her hospital bed she sent word to her fans: as soon as she could walk, she would fly again. And she did.

How Did Bessie Coleman Die?

In the spring of 1926, Coleman was in Jacksonville, Florida, preparing for a major show. She had finally saved enough to buy her own aircraft, a Curtiss Jenny, which a young mechanic named William Wills flew down from Texas - a trip so troubled that Wills had to make forced landings along the way. The airplane was old war-surplus and poorly maintained.

On the morning of April 30, 1926, Coleman and Wills took the aircraft up on a test flight, with Wills flying in the front seat. Coleman had left her seatbelt unbuckled so she could lean over the side of the cockpit and scout the field for the next day’s planned parachute jump.

At about 2,000 feet, a loose wrench - left in the engine compartment during the aircraft’s careless maintenance - slid into the controls and jammed them. The Jenny nosed over into a violent dive and flipped, throwing Coleman from the cockpit. She fell roughly 500 feet and was killed. She was 34 years old. Wills died moments later in the crash.

Bessie Coleman’s Legacy

The story did not end in that Florida field. An estimated 10,000 people attended her memorial in Chicago, and the journalist and civil rights leader Ida B. Wells presided over the service.

A few years after her death, William Powell founded the Bessie Coleman Aero Club in Los Angeles to teach Black aviators to fly - exactly the institution Coleman had dreamed of building. From clubs and efforts like it came a generation of Black pilots, including some who went on to become Tuskegee Airmen - the “Red Tails” who escorted bombers over Europe in World War II.

For years, Black aviators flew over her grave at Lincoln Cemetery in Chicago and dropped flowers from the air in an annual flyover for Queen Bess. In 1995, the U.S. Postal Service honored her with a postage stamp. Scholarships bear her name, airport roads are named for her, and in recent years a major airline assembled an entire flight crew of Black women - pilots, mechanics, and ground crew - and flew a flight in her honor. Everything that was impossible for her in 1920 now flies under her name.

Coleman’s achievement was not destiny - it was one stubborn decision after another: one boat, one language class, one broken leg she got up from. That is how the sky gets opened, one determined person at a time.

Key Takeaways

• Bessie Coleman (born 1892, Atlanta, Texas) became the first Black woman and first Native American woman in the world to earn a pilot’s license, on June 15, 1921.
• Denied by every U.S. flight school, she learned French and trained in France, earning the internationally recognized FAI license - the first American of any background to do so.
• She was a leading barnstorming stunt pilot of the 1920s, performing as “Queen Bess” while advocating for Black aviators and refusing to fly at segregated venues.
• She died on April 30, 1926, at age 34, thrown from an aircraft with an unbuckled seatbelt after a loose wrench jammed the controls.
• Her dream inspired the Bessie Coleman Aero Club and helped pave the way for the Tuskegee Airmen; she was honored with a U.S. postage stamp in 1995.