Queen Bess, the French License, and the Woman Who Had to Cross an Ocean to Find a Flight School That Would Take Her

Bessie Coleman earned her international pilot’s license on June 15, 1921, becoming the first Black woman in the world to hold one - and the first person of Native American descent as well, through her Cherokee heritage. She did not accomplish this by finding a school that accepted her. She crossed the Atlantic and learned to fly in a country that would judge her on her ability alone.

Why No American School Would Train Her

Coleman was born January 26, 1892, in Atlanta, Georgia, and grew up in Waxahachie, Texas, as the tenth of thirteen children. Her father George was part Cherokee. Her mother Susan, a Black woman, kept the family in school while working domestic jobs and cotton fields, tracking down books wherever she could find them. Coleman eventually attended the Colored Agricultural and Normal University in Langston, Oklahoma, but could only afford one term before returning home.

In 1915, she joined the Great Migration north to Chicago, landing a job as a manicurist at the White Sox Barber Shop on South State Street - a gathering point at the center of the South Side’s thriving Black community.

After the Great War ended, returning Black soldiers brought back stories from France: airfields, aircraft, and a country where they had been treated as men rather than a category. Coleman’s brother John came into the barbershop and ribbed her that French women could fly airplanes. He was teasing. He badly misjudged who he was talking to.

Coleman went to flight schools in Chicago. Every one turned her away - because she was a woman, because she was Black, because that is how doors worked in 1919 and 1920.

How She Got to France

Robert Abbott, publisher of the Chicago Defender and one of the most influential Black men in America at the time, saw the story immediately when Coleman walked into his office. He pointed her toward France, where flight schools carried none of the same barriers, and helped her plan the path. Jesse Binga, a successful Black banker on the South Side, helped her assemble the money.

By November 1920, Coleman had sailed for France.

Training at the Caudron Brothers’ School

The Caudron Brothers’ School of Aviation was at Le Crotoy in the Somme region of northern France - the same ground where the trenches of the Great War had gone cold barely five years earlier. The Caudron brothers had been building aircraft since the earliest days of powered flight. Their program was rigorous: cross-country navigation without modern aids, precision spot landings, maneuvers that proved the student understood the machine rather than merely occupying the cockpit. The trainers were open-cockpit biplanes with no radios. The smell of castor oil from the engine. The cold at altitude that got into your bones.

Coleman completed all of it, in a language she barely spoke when she arrived.

The License That Changed Aviation History

On June 15, 1921, Bessie Coleman received her Fédération Aéronautique Internationale pilot’s license, number 1865. She was the first Black woman in the world to earn an international pilot’s license, and simultaneously the first person of Native American descent - two barriers broken with a single document, on a continent three thousand miles from the country that had refused to teach her.

She did not come home immediately. She stayed in Europe for additional aerobatic training in France and Germany, studying figure eights, spiral dives, and steep banks. She was building a show, and she knew the show had to be good enough to make people stop whatever they were doing and look up.

Queen Bess on the American Barnstorming Circuit

Coleman returned to the United States in September 1921, and the Chicago Defender covered her arrival as the homecoming it was.

On September 3, 1922, she performed her first American airshow at Glenn Curtiss Field in Garden City, New York, flying figure eights and spiral dives and steep banks the crowd could feel in their chests. She called herself Queen Bess. Some reporters called her Brave Bessie. She wore a military-style uniform, tailored and sharp, and she understood the theater of the whole thing - built from a lifetime of watching audiences in barbershops, churches, and streets.

She had one rule she would not bend for anyone: she refused to perform at segregated airshows. She would not fly anywhere that Black spectators were made to enter through a different gate, stand behind a different fence, or watch from a separate section. This cost her engagements. This cost her money. Promoters pressed her. She did not move.

The barnstorming circuit of the 1920s was where most Americans first encountered an airplane - Curtiss Jennies going field to field, selling five-dollar rides, shaping how ordinary people thought about flight and who belonged in the air. Those fields largely mirrored the segregation of the communities around them. Coleman walked into that world and said her show was going to be different, one airfield at a time.

The School She Was Building Toward

Beneath every performance was a larger plan. Coleman intended to open a flying school for Black Americans - a school where the door would not be slammed before you got to ask your question. Every dollar she earned performing went toward that school, which did not yet exist but which she was absolutely certain she was going to build.

By 1926 she had saved enough to purchase a used Curtiss JN-4 Jenny. She had it shipped to Jacksonville, Florida, where she was scheduled to perform an airshow on May 1, 1926.

April 30, 1926: The Day Before the Show

Coleman needed to scout the field - identify drop zones for the parachutists she had booked, check sight lines, plan where the crowd would stand. Her mechanic, William D. Wills, was in the front cockpit flying the airplane. Coleman was in the rear cockpit, leaning over the side to study the ground below her.

She was not wearing her seatbelt. You cannot lean over the side of an open cockpit to see what is directly below you if you are belted in.

A wrench left loose in the engine compartment had worked its way into the control mechanism. The Jenny pitched into a dive, then rolled, then spun. Something that simple. Something that preventable. The controls stopped responding. Coleman was thrown from the aircraft at approximately 3,000 feet.

She was 34 years old. Wills died when the aircraft hit the ground moments later.

The May 1 airshow was cancelled. Ten thousand people came to her funeral in Chicago. Ida B. Wells, the journalist and civil rights leader, helped organize the memorial services. The Chicago Defender ran her obituary on the front page.

The Line She Drew Through Aviation History

She never built the school. The timeline she had given herself did not survive that morning over Jacksonville.

But the line she drew did not disappear.

Willa Brown read about Bessie Coleman and decided she was going to fly. In 1937, Brown became the first Black woman in the United States to hold a commercial pilot’s license. She and her husband Cornelius Coffey co-founded the Coffey School of Aeronautics in Chicago. When the Army Air Corps needed civilian flight instructors to support what would become the Tuskegee Airmen program, the Coffey School was one of the institutions they called. There is a straight line from Coleman’s Jenny to the P-51 Mustangs those men flew over Europe - you just have to know where to look.

Ensign Jesse Brown, the first Black naval aviator in United States history, carried a photograph of Bessie Coleman with him. He was killed in action over Korea in December 1950, covering the retreat from the Chosin Reservoir.

The Bessie Coleman Aero Club was organized in Los Angeles in 1929, three years after her death, specifically to train Black aviators. In 2006, the United States Postal Service put her face on a stamp. Texas designated April 30 as Bessie Coleman Day. Chicago named a street near O’Hare International Airport after her - which is exactly where a pilot’s name belongs.

Key Takeaways

Bessie Coleman earned her FAI pilot’s license (No. 1865) on June 15, 1921, becoming the first Black woman in the world - and the first person of Native American descent - to hold an international pilot’s license.
Every American flight school refused her on the basis of race and gender. She learned French, crossed the Atlantic, and trained at the Caudron Brothers’ School at Le Crotoy, France.
She refused to perform at segregated airshows, using her visibility on the barnstorming circuit to challenge the same barriers that had kept her out of the cockpit.
She was actively working toward opening a flying school for Black Americans when she died in a scouting flight accident on April 30, 1926, at age 34.
Her legacy ran directly through Willa Brown and the Coffey School of Aeronautics to the Tuskegee Airmen program - a connection that traces from one closed door in Chicago to P-51 Mustangs over Europe.