Posted
on January 26, 2015
I
don't know if you had met Bessie Coleman on the day of her birth,
January 26, 1892, if you could've guessed that one day she would be
the subject of biographies and a Wikipedia article.
She
was born in Atlanta, Texas, the tenth child of African American
sharecroppers. (They had three more kids after Bessie.) Sharecroppers
are people who do not own land. They farm someone else's land and in
return get some share of the crops they harvest (hence the term
sharecropper). It isn't easy to go from being a sharecropper
to being a landowner!
And,
trust me, it wasn't easy to go from being a sharecroppers' daughter
to being a woman accomplished enough to have an entry in
Wikipedia!
Coleman went to a segregated one-room school for all eight available grades and was an outstanding student. Later, she was only able to afford one term at the Oklahoma Colored Agricultural and Normal University. She moved to Chicago and got a job as a manicurist.
Coleman went to a segregated one-room school for all eight available grades and was an outstanding student. Later, she was only able to afford one term at the Oklahoma Colored Agricultural and Normal University. She moved to Chicago and got a job as a manicurist.
But
she didn't want to be manicurist. She wanted to be a pilot. At that
time, in the early 1900s, black people were not allowed in flight
schools in the U.S. Also, women were not allowed in flight schools in
the U.S. Two strikes against her...but they didn't stop her.
Coleman
studied French, and then she traveled to Paris on November 20, 1920.
There she learned to fly a biplane with a steering system that
consisted of a vertical stick in front of the pilot and a rudder bar
under the pilot's feet.
Her
determination and I-will-go-anywhere-to-meet-my-goal attitude paid
off. In 1921 Coleman became, not only the first woman of African
American descent to earn an international pilot's license from the
Federation Aeronautique Internationale, she became the American –
man or woman, black or white – to do so! She was also the first
woman of African American descent to earn any sort of pilot's
license.
Coleman
wasn't content with just doing the minimum to get her license. After
getting her license, she continued to polish her skills by taking
lessons from a French ace pilot.
When
Coleman returned to the U.S., late in 1921, she was a media
sensation.
Still,
there was no way to make money as a commercial pilot at the time.
Pilots in the U.S. made their money by “barnstorming” and doing
stunt flying in front of paid audiences. So Coleman needed to learn
stunt flying.
Nobody
in the U.S. was willing to teach her, so Coleman returned to France
for more training. She even studied flight with some then-bigwigs in
airplane design and aviation in the Netherlands and Germany. She
returned to the U.S. well trained, ready to take on the world of
exhibition flying.
Queen
Bess was Coleman's “stage name,” and she was very popular with
audiences. People wrote newspaper articles about her, and she was
invited to important events. She was sometimes billed as the world's
greatest woman flier. She did figure eights, loops, and near-ground
dips for large and enthusiastic crowds of all races.
Stunt
flying isn't all cheering crowds and success, of course. Once
Coleman's plane stalled and crashed, and she broke a leg and three
ribs. And unfortunately, she died in a plane crash when she was just
34 years old.
Still,
Coleman's fame and successes did empower other women and other black
people to feel that they, too, could learn to fly.
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