Bessie Coleman, Queen Bess, and the Texas Cottonpicker Who Crossed an Ocean to Get the Pilot's License America Wouldn't Give Her

Bessie Coleman became the first African American woman and the first woman of Native American descent to earn a pilot’s license - but she had to leave the United States to do it. Denied entry to American flight schools because she was both Black and a woman, she learned French, sailed to France, and on June 15, 1921 earned an international license from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI). She went on to become one of the most celebrated stunt flyers of the 1920s, known to crowds as Queen Bess.

Who Was Bessie Coleman?

Bessie Coleman was born in 1892 in Waxahachie, Texas, a cotton town south of Dallas. She was one of thirteen children. Her father was of mixed Black and Cherokee heritage and left the family when she was young, returning to Indian Territory in search of fairer treatment than Texas offered. Her mother stayed behind, took in laundry, and raised the children alone.

By age ten, Bessie was already dragging a canvas sack down the cotton rows. But she was a gifted student who read aloud to her family in the evenings and resented every school day lost to picking season. She completed one term of college in Oklahoma before her money ran out.

Like many during the Great Migration, she moved north to Chicago, where her brothers had settled. There she trained as a manicurist, working a chair in a South Side barbershop and winning a contest as the best and fastest manicurist in Black Chicago.

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

The turning point came as soldiers returned from World War I in 1918 and 1919. In the barbershop, veterans traded stories about the airplanes they’d seen over Europe. Her own brother John, who had served in France, taunted her - saying French women could even fly airplanes, something she never would.

That challenge lit a fire. Bessie decided she would become a pilot. But when she approached American flight schools around 1920, every door closed. Few schools existed, and those that did refused women - and most certainly refused a Black woman. She was turned away again and again, for reasons that had nothing to do with whether she could fly.

Her friend Robert Abbott, publisher of the influential Black newspaper the Chicago Defender, offered the advice that changed her life: go to France, where the flight schools didn’t care about the color of an applicant’s skin.

How Did Bessie Coleman Earn Her Pilot’s License?

Bessie prepared with extraordinary discipline. She enrolled in a Berlitz school to learn French at night after work, saved every dollar, took a second job managing a chili parlor, and secured sponsorship from Abbott and another businessman.

In November 1920, she sailed across the Atlantic. She trained at the Caudron brothers’ aviation school in Le Crotoy, on the northern coast of France. Her aircraft was a Nieuport with a 27-foot wingspan - a temperamental machine with a rotary engine that sprayed castor oil back at the pilot, no real brakes, and control by stick and rudder bar alone.

The training was brutal. She sometimes walked ten miles to reach the airfield, and she witnessed another student die in a crash. She wrote later, “I picked myself up and went on.”

On June 15, 1921, the FAI issued her pilot’s license. Because it was an international FAI credential, she could fly anywhere in the world - and she earned it months before some of the famous American aviators of her era held the same qualification.

Bessie Coleman the Barnstormer: Becoming Queen Bess

A license alone couldn’t pay the bills. In the 1920s, a working aviator was a barnstormer - a stunt flyer performing loops, rolls, and dives for gasping crowds. Recognizing she needed advanced training, Bessie returned to Europe, studying acrobatics in France, in Holland with Anthony Fokker’s company, and in Germany. She came home in 1922 ready to perform.

Her first major American exhibition took place in September 1922 on Long Island, at an air show honoring the veterans of an all-Black WWI regiment and sponsored by Robert Abbott and the Defender. The papers billed her as “the world’s greatest woman flyer.”

Flying war-surplus Curtiss Jenny biplanes, she thrilled audiences with loops, barrel rolls, and figure eights, cutting the engine to dive low before pulling out at the last moment. When no parachutist was available, she jumped herself. Dressed in a trim military-style jacket, leather helmet, and goggles, Queen Bess also lectured at churches, theaters, and schools, telling young Black audiences - especially young women - that the sky belonged to them too.

She famously said, “The air is the only place free from prejudices.”

Standing on Principle

Bessie refused to trade her dignity for opportunity. Offered a starring role in a motion picture, she walked off the set when she learned her first scene required her to appear in tattered clothes playing a demeaning stereotype - and never returned.

In her own hometown of Waxahachie, she agreed to fly an exhibition only on the condition that white and Black spectators enter through the same gate. The organizers had planned separate entrances; Bessie made them use one.

Her deepest ambition was to open a flight school for young Black aviators, so no one with her hunger would ever have to cross an ocean for a fair chance at the sky. She was saving for it, show by show.

How Did Bessie Coleman Die?

On April 30, 1926, in Jacksonville, Florida, Bessie went up on a rehearsal flight ahead of a May Day exhibition. Her mechanic and pilot, William Wills, was at the controls of her recently purchased Jenny - a tired machine that had suffered forced landings and engine trouble on its trip from Texas.

Bessie, planning her parachute jump for the next day, leaned out over the cockpit rail to study the field below. To see over the edge, she was not wearing her seatbelt. At about 2,000 feet, the airplane failed to pull out of a dive, nosed over, and flipped upside down. Bessie was thrown clear and fell to her death. She was 34 years old. Wills died in the crash.

Investigators found the cause in the wreckage: a loose wrench had slid into the control gears and jammed them. One misplaced tool, at the wrong altitude, ended her life.

Bessie Coleman’s Legacy

Roughly 10,000 people mourned her in Chicago, where the journalist and activist Ida B. Wells presided over the service. She was buried at Lincoln Cemetery on the South Side.

Her influence only grew. William Powell, inspired by her example, founded the Bessie Coleman Aero Clubs in Los Angeles to bring young Black men and women into aviation. Many see a direct line from that seed to the Tuskegee Airmen of World War II.

Since the 1930s, Black aviators have flown over Lincoln Cemetery each year on the anniversary of her death to drop flowers on her grave. A U.S. postage stamp bears her face, and roads, schools, and scholarships carry her name. In recent years, an airline honored her by staffing an entire flight - pilots, mechanics, and crew - with Black women.

A true pioneer isn’t just the first one through; she’s the one who makes the trail wide enough for everyone behind her. Bessie Coleman made it wide.

Key Takeaways

• Bessie Coleman (born 1892, Waxahachie, Texas) was the first African American woman and first Native American–descended woman to hold a pilot’s license.
• Barred from U.S. flight schools, she learned French and trained in France, earning her FAI international license on June 15, 1921.
• As the barnstormer Queen Bess, she performed daring stunts and used her platform to insist Black audiences could claim the sky too.
• She died on April 30, 1926, at age 34, thrown from her aircraft when a loose wrench jammed the controls at about 2,000 feet.
• Her legacy inspired the Bessie Coleman Aero Clubs, influenced the path toward the Tuskegee Airmen, and endures in an annual flyover tradition begun in the 1930s.