Bessie Coleman, the Nieuport Biplane, and the French License No American School Would Give Her

Bessie Coleman received her international pilot’s license on June 15, 1921, becoming the first African American woman - and the first woman of Native American descent - to hold one. Every American flight school had refused her application. So she learned French, crossed the Atlantic, and trained on open-cockpit biplanes in northern France until she had that license in hand. Then she came home and refused to fly at any venue that wouldn’t let Black and white spectators through the same gate.

Who Was Bessie Coleman?

Elizabeth Coleman was born on January 26, 1892, in Atlanta, Texas - a small farming community in the piney woods of northeast Texas, not the city most people picture. She was the tenth of thirteen children. Her father, George Coleman, was three-quarters Choctaw and one-quarter African American. Her mother, Susan, was African American. Both were sharecroppers.

When Bessie was two, the family moved to Waxahachie, Texas, where they built a three-room house on a quarter acre of land they actually owned - a meaningful distinction for a Black family in post-Reconstruction Texas. Her father eventually left for Indian Territory, soon to become Oklahoma, and her mother refused to go. Susan Coleman raised her children alone, picking cotton and walking them four miles each way to a one-room schoolhouse.

Bessie worked those fields and kept the family’s books. She earned one semester at Langston Industrial College in Oklahoma - one semester was all the money allowed. In 1915, at age 23, she moved to Chicago, where her brothers John and Walter were already living. She trained as a manicurist and went to work at the White Sox Barber Shop on the North Side.

Why Did No American Flight School Accept Bessie Coleman?

When World War I ended, pilots came home with stories. Her brother John had served in France and told her - with a sibling’s particular cruelty - that French women were superior to American women because French women could fly airplanes. He was trying to needle her. She took it as a mission.

Coleman wrote to flight schools across the United States. Every one turned her down. She was a woman and she was Black, and in America in 1919, those two facts together meant certain doors did not open from the outside.

Robert Abbott, founder of the Chicago Defender - one of the most influential Black newspapers in the country, with readers from Chicago to the deep South - took notice. His advice was blunt: if no American school would teach her, she should learn French and go to France.

How Did Bessie Coleman Get to France?

Coleman spent a year studying French. She worked extra shifts, saved every dollar, and secured financial backing from Abbott and from Chicago banker Jesse Binga. In November 1920, she sailed for Europe.

She enrolled at the École d’Aviation des Frères Caudron - the Caudron Brothers aviation school - in Le Crotoy, in the Somme region of northern France. This was the same Somme that four years earlier had been torn apart by some of the worst artillery exchanges in the history of warfare. The craters were still visible in the fields around the aerodrome.

What Airplane Did Bessie Coleman Train On?

Coleman trained on Nieuport biplanes - wood, fabric, and wire construction. Open cockpit, no weather protection, no margin for sloppiness. The instructor demonstrated a maneuver; the student executed it. Wind, engine noise, and the smell of castor oil in the slipstream told you whether you had gotten it right.

She soloed in approximately seven months - a normal timeline for the era, not a slow one. Her fellow students took notice. She was a natural.

When Did Bessie Coleman Earn Her Pilot’s License?

On June 15, 1921, Coleman received her international pilot’s license from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, the governing body for aviation records and licensing at the time. She was 29 years old.

She was the first African American woman in history to hold a pilot’s license. She was also, by virtue of her Choctaw heritage, the first woman of Native American descent to hold one.

What Did Bessie Coleman Do After Earning Her License?

She didn’t come straight home. She stayed in Europe for advanced training - additional time in France and a period in Germany - studying aerobatics: loop-the-loops, wingovers, precision formation passes. She had determined that making a living in 1920s American aviation meant putting on a show, and if she was going to compete on the barnstorming circuit, she intended to be the most capable pilot on the field.

Back in the United States, the press went sideways over her. The Chicago Defender ran her story on the front page. The New York Tribune picked it up. Headline writers called her “Brave Bessie” and “Queen Bess.”

Her first American airshow was on September 3, 1922, at Curtiss Field in Garden City, New York. Figure eights, loops, chandelles - she flew low and precisely, and several thousand people who had barely heard of her a month before left talking about her. She barnstormed through Texas, California, and the Midwest, and performed at the Checkerboard Airdrome in Chicago in front of what was likely the largest crowd she had seen to that point.

Why Did Bessie Coleman Refuse to Perform at Segregated Venues?

This aspect of her story is easy to pass over in the catalogue of firsts, and it deserves its own attention. Coleman refused to perform at any fairground or airfield that would not allow Black and white spectators through the same gate. She walked away from engagements. She turned down money.

For a woman building a career from nothing, with no family wealth and no safety net, turning down a paying show required a specific kind of courage that has nothing to do with aerobatics. She held that line in Texas, in the South, in places where a Black woman refusing a venue’s terms carried genuine physical risk. She held it anyway.

What Was Bessie Coleman’s Larger Goal?

Every airshow was a fundraiser. Coleman wanted to open a flight school open to all Americans - especially Black Americans being shut out of aviation training the same way she had been. The barnstorming wasn’t performance for its own sake. It was capital-building toward something larger.

By 1926, she had real momentum. A reputation that crossed racial lines. The beginnings of actual capital. The school felt close.

How Did Bessie Coleman Die?

On April 30, 1926, Coleman was in Jacksonville, Florida, preparing for an airshow the following day. Her mechanic and publicity manager, a pilot named William Wills, was flying her Curtiss JN-4D Jenny on a practice run to scout the field. Bessie was in the rear cockpit - no seatbelt - leaning over the side to observe the ground below.

At approximately 2,000 feet, the controls jammed. The Jenny entered an uncontrolled nosedive, then rolled inverted. Coleman was thrown from the aircraft and fell 2,000 feet.

She was 34 years old. William Wills died in the crash moments later. Investigators found a wrench left loose in the control system - a maintenance error. That is what ended a life that had survived poverty, racial exclusion, an ocean crossing, a French winter, and every door America could close in front of her.

10,000 people attended her funeral in Jacksonville. Another 5,000 in Orlando. When her body returned to Chicago, the services lasted for days. She never got to open her school.

What Is Bessie Coleman’s Legacy in Aviation?

The ripples from her life kept moving long after she was gone.

Pilot William Powell published Black Wings in 1934, specifically to encourage Black Americans to pursue aviation, and helped organize the Bessie Coleman Aero Club in Los Angeles - one of the first Black aviation clubs in the country. The Challenger Air Pilots Association formed in Chicago in the late 1920s and flew over her grave in tribute every year.

Many of the Tuskegee Airmen - the Black combat pilots who flew in World War II and permanently altered the argument about what Black aviators could accomplish - flew their aircraft over Bessie Coleman’s grave in Chicago before their first combat sortie. She had been dead for fifteen years by then. She never knew them. But something she had set in motion was still moving, still pulling people forward.

In 1995, the U.S. Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp bearing her image. In 2006, she was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame.

Key Takeaways

• On June 15, 1921, Bessie Coleman became the first African American woman and first woman of Native American descent to earn an international pilot’s license - after every American flight school refused her application.
• She trained on Nieuport biplanes at the École d’Aviation des Frères Caudron in Le Crotoy, France, and soloed in approximately seven months.
• She refused to perform at segregated venues, walking away from paying engagements rather than accept conditions that excluded Black spectators - in the South, at genuine personal risk.
• Every airshow was a fundraiser toward her real goal: a flight school open to all Americans, particularly Black Americans locked out of aviation training. She never lived to open it.
• She died on April 30, 1926, at age 34, thrown from her aircraft after a loose wrench jammed the controls - but the Tuskegee Airmen flew over her grave in tribute before their combat sorties, fifteen years after her death.