Bessie Coleman, the Chicago Manicurist Who Had to Cross an Ocean Just to Learn to Fly

Bessie Coleman became the first African American and the first person of Native American descent to earn an international pilot’s license - not because the United States made room for her, but because she refused to wait for it to. She taught herself French, crossed the Atlantic, and earned her wings in France in 1921, at a time when no American flight school would accept her application.

Why Every American Flight School Turned Bessie Coleman Away

Coleman was born in Atlanta, Texas, in January 1892, one of thirteen children in a sharecropping family. Her father was part Cherokee, her mother Black. When her father relocated to the Indian Territory - what would become Oklahoma - her mother stayed behind in Texas and raised the children alone. Coleman walked four miles each way to a one-room schoolhouse and finished eighth grade, which was as far as the county’s segregated system would take her. She saved enough for one semester at the Colored Agricultural and Normal University in Langston, Oklahoma (now Langston University) before the money ran out.

In 1915, she joined the stream of Black Americans heading north during the Great Migration and settled on Chicago’s South Side with her brother Walter. She found work as a manicurist at the White Sox Barbershop on State Street - a place where returning World War I soldiers talked about what it felt like to fly.

Those stories got into her. She told her brother she wanted to become a pilot. He dismissed the idea. She didn’t.

How Bessie Coleman Got to France to Learn to Fly

Coleman went to Robert Abbott, founder and publisher of the Chicago Defender, one of the most influential Black newspapers in the country. Abbott believed in her. He encouraged her to apply to flight schools in France and may have helped fund the effort.

She spent months studying French, researched the best European aviation schools, and got accepted. In November 1920, she boarded a ship for Europe. She was 28 years old.

Where Bessie Coleman Trained and What She Flew

Coleman trained at the Caudron Brothers School of Aviation in Le Crotoy, France. She flew Nieuports - light, fast biplanes with rotary engines that required a pilot to feel the aircraft rather than just manage it. Her instructors reported she was more than capable.

On June 15, 1921, she received her pilot’s license from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, the international governing body for aviation at the time. She was the first African American and the first person of Native American descent to hold an international pilot’s license - the first of her kind anywhere in the world.

She went back to Europe for a second round of training, this time focused on aerobatics and exhibition flying, working with some of the top European pilots of the era.

Queen Bess: Barnstorming on Her Own Terms

When Coleman returned to the United States in the fall of 1921, the Chicago Defender ran the story on the front page. She performed at airshows across the country - parachute jumps, figure eights, low passes - in a military-cut uniform she had designed herself. She called herself Queen Bess.

The crowds came out in the thousands. And she had terms.

Airshow promoters across a rigidly segregated America wanted her badly. She told them directly: she would not perform at any show where the audience was segregated. Black and white spectators would enter through the same gate and stand on the same ground, or she did not fly. There is a documented case from Texas where promoters initially refused her conditions. She cancelled. They came back. She flew.

She used the one thing they wanted - her skill in the cockpit - as leverage for basic human dignity.

The Flight School Bessie Coleman Never Got to Build

Coleman’s larger goal was to open a flight school where Black Americans could learn to fly, on American soil, without crossing an ocean. She toured Black churches, schools, and theaters - not just to perform, but to recruit. She talked about her school constantly and built toward it with every airshow appearance.

To fund it, she kept flying.

How Bessie Coleman Died

On April 30, 1926, Coleman was in Jacksonville, Florida, preparing for an airshow scheduled for the following day - a benefit performance. Her business manager, William Wills, had flown the aircraft down from Texas: a Curtiss JN-4, the ubiquitous Jenny trainer turned barnstorming workhorse. The flight from Texas had been troubled. The aircraft had mechanical problems en route that were not addressed adequately.

Coleman wanted to survey the airfield from the air to plan her routine. She flew as a passenger while Wills piloted. She was in the forward cockpit without her seatbelt, leaning out over the side to scout the field below.

At approximately 2,000 feet, the aircraft nosed over into a dive, then rolled. Coleman was thrown from the cockpit. She was 34 years old. Wills could not recover the aircraft and died in the crash moments later. The investigation found a loose wrench in the control mechanism had jammed the flight controls.

Why Bessie Coleman Still Matters to Aviation

The flight school Coleman never built did get built - not by her, but because of her. The pilots, activists, and advocates she inspired during her years of barnstorming carried the dream forward. Her legacy runs directly into the lineage of the Tuskegee Airmen, who proved to a resistant country during World War II that it had been catastrophically wrong about who could fly.

Coleman was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame. The United States Postal Service issued a stamp in her honor in 1995. Every year, Black pilots from the Chicago area fly over her grave at Lincoln Cemetery and drop flowers from the air.

She never gave a single flight lesson. She changed American aviation anyway.

Key Takeaways

• Bessie Coleman was born in January 1892 in Atlanta, Texas, and became a manicurist in Chicago before pursuing aviation.
• Every American flight school refused her admission; she taught herself French and trained at the Caudron Brothers School of Aviation in Le Crotoy, France.
• On June 15, 1921, she became the first African American and first person of Native American descent to earn an international pilot’s license.
• She refused to perform at segregated airshows - and enforced that policy even when it meant walking away from bookings.
• She died on April 30, 1926, at age 34, when a mechanical failure caused her to be thrown from an aircraft over Jacksonville, Florida.
• Her vision of a Black-owned American flight school and the pilots she inspired contributed directly to the foundation of the Tuskegee Airmen program.