Bessie Coleman, the License She Had to Cross the Atlantic to Earn, and the Barnstorming Career She Built on Her Own Terms

Bessie Coleman became the first African American and the first person of Black and Native American heritage to hold a pilot’s license anywhere in the world on June 28, 1921, earning her Fédération Aéronautique Internationale certificate after every American flight school refused to accept her based on her race and gender. She was 28 years old. That license launched a barnstorming career she conducted entirely on her own terms - including a documented refusal to perform at venues that segregated their audiences.

Who Was Bessie Coleman?

Bessie Coleman was born in 1892 in Atlanta, Texas, one of thirteen children in a sharecropper family. Her father was part Cherokee; her mother was Black. She picked cotton from childhood and kept the family accounts - she could add figures faster than most adults could manage with pencil and paper.

At eighteen, she joined the Great Migration north to Chicago, eventually working as a manicurist on the South Side. The shop drew Black veterans of the First World War - men who had been to Europe and talked about aerial combat over France and Belgium. Her brother John, who had served with the Army in France, told her that French women were flying airplanes. The implication was not subtle.

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

Starting around 1919, Coleman applied to every flight school she could reach in the United States. She wrote letters. She showed up in person. Every single school turned her away.

The obstacles were compounding: she was a woman, and she was Black. Some schools didn’t accept women. Some didn’t accept Black applicants. Almost none were prepared to handle both simultaneously. The American aviation establishment of 1919 was not ready for Bessie Coleman.

She brought the problem to Robert Abbott, founder of the Chicago Defender, one of the most widely read Black newspapers in the country. Abbott and prominent banker Jesse Binga encouraged her and helped her identify a path forward. That path led to France.

How Did Bessie Coleman Earn Her Pilot’s License?

Coleman spent two years learning French at night and saving every dollar she could. In November 1920, she booked passage to Europe.

She trained at the Caudron Brothers’ School of Aviation in Le Crotoy, in the Somme region of northern France - the same ground over which the great air war had been fought just two years earlier. She flew a Nieuport biplane, an aircraft with responsive controls and no tolerance for sloppy inputs. Winter weather over the Somme - cold, wet, and gusty - separated students who would become pilots from those who wouldn’t. She watched classmates wash out.

She did not wash out.

On June 28, 1921, Bessie Coleman received her FAI pilot’s license, certificate number 1,077. She was the first African American to earn an international pilot’s certificate and the first person of Black and Native American heritage to hold a pilot’s license anywhere in the world.

The Chicago Defender ran it on the front page. The Black press across the country picked it up.

What Did Bessie Coleman’s Barnstorming Career Look Like?

A license alone wasn’t enough - Coleman needed exhibition skills. She returned to Europe to train further with experienced airshow pilots in France and Germany, building loops, chandelles, and the precision placement that barnstorming demanded. These are skills built from thousands of repetitions, flown in aircraft with no autopilot, no nav system, and no forgiveness if the engine quit over a grandstand at two hundred feet.

She returned to the United States in the summer of 1922. Her first American airshow was on September 3, 1922, at Curtiss Field, Long Island. She looped. She held steep banks at the edge of control. She came in low over the grandstand in dives that made the wire braces of the Jenny hum in the slipstream. The newspapers called her “Brave Bessie.”

She was working a circuit with minimal regulation, aircraft that could fail without warning, and a mortality rate that every pilot on the circuit understood clearly. The good ones knew exactly what line they were walking.

Did Bessie Coleman Refuse to Perform at Segregated Shows?

Yes - and it cost her real bookings.

The airshow circuit of the 1920s operated under the same segregation rules governing most of American public life. Black spectators were directed to separate gates, separate sections, and inferior viewing positions. Coleman refused to perform at any venue that segregated its audiences.

This was not a symbolic gesture. Promoters ran the gates. Local officials controlled the fairgrounds. Refusing segregation meant refusing the booking - walking away from the show, the crowd, and the paycheck. There are documented accounts from her Texas appearances where she made integrated crowds a condition of her performance. Sometimes she got it. Sometimes she walked away entirely.

She did it repeatedly, at genuine cost to her career and income.

What Was Bessie Coleman Trying to Build?

Coleman spoke openly about her larger purpose: a flight school where Black pilots and women pilots could train without having the door closed before they even asked the question. The school that every American institution had refused to be for her, she intended to build herself.

The airshow circuit was the fundraiser. By 1926, she had real momentum - substantial press following, real crowds, and a financial base beginning to take shape.

How Did Bessie Coleman Die?

On April 30, 1926, Coleman was in Jacksonville, Florida, with a show scheduled for the following day. She went up as a passenger in a Curtiss Jenny flown by her mechanic and publicity manager, William Wills, to do a low reconnaissance of the show grounds. She wanted to see the layout from the air to plan her parachute jump for the next day’s performance.

She was leaning out of the open cockpit to look at the ground below. She was not strapped in. She had no parachute.

The airplane suddenly pitched into an uncontrolled dive, then rolled inverted. Coleman was thrown from the aircraft at approximately 1,500 feet. The subsequent investigation found a wrench loose inside the aircraft that had jammed the controls. The airplane was unrecoverable. William Wills also died in the crash.

Bessie Coleman was 34 years old.

What Is Bessie Coleman’s Legacy in Aviation?

About a year after Coleman’s death, Charles Lindbergh flew to Paris. The barnstorming era didn’t end that day, but it began its long fade. The Air Commerce Act of 1926 had already started formalizing the industry - requiring aircraft certification and federal pilot licensing - and the era of Jennys and county fairgrounds was giving way to something more accountable and eventually safer.

The generation of Black pilots who followed Coleman - many of whom would become the Tuskegee Airmen during the Second World War - said later that they had heard about Brave Bessie as children. That the coverage in the Black press had planted something in them. That she had made flight seem possible at a time when almost nothing about their daily lives was designed to suggest that it was.

Pilots began dropping flowers from aircraft over her grave at Lincoln Cemetery in Chicago on her birthday and on the anniversary of her death. The tradition continued for decades, carried forward by the community she had tried to build a school for.

Coleman now appears on the United States quarter. Airports, schools, and a postage stamp bear her name. The recognition is deserved.

Key Takeaways

• Bessie Coleman was born in 1892 in Atlanta, Texas, and overcame compounding racial and gender barriers that shut her out of every American flight school she applied to.
• She crossed the Atlantic to train in France, earning her FAI pilot’s license on June 28, 1921 - certificate number 1,077 - becoming the first African American and first person of Black and Native American heritage to hold an international pilot’s certificate.
• Her barnstorming career was built on genuine aerial skill; newspapers called her “Brave Bessie” after her debut American airshow at Curtiss Field, Long Island, on September 3, 1922.
• She refused to perform at segregated venues, a principled stand that repeatedly cost her bookings and income.
• Her ultimate goal was to open a flight school for Black and women pilots - a dream she was actively fundraising for when she died in a crash on April 30, 1926, in Jacksonville, Florida, at age 34.