sff_corgi_lj | Mar. 20th, 2004

Bessie Coleman

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Bessie Coleman was born into a large family in Atlanta, Texas, on January 26, 1892, the tenth of thirteen children. By the time of Bessie’s birth, Susan and George Coleman, her parents, had been married for 17 years. George was of mixed blood—part African-American and part Cherokee. Migrating Georgians had founded the town some 10 years before her birth. Its residents numbered fewer than 1,000. ¹

As her older sibs started work in the fields, Bessie kept her eyes on her sisters and helped her mother work in her garden. She began school at the age of six and had to walk 4 miles each day to her all-black school. She was intelligent and established herself as an outstanding math student. However, Every year the routine of school, chores, and church was shattered by the cotton harvest. Each man, woman, boy and girl was needed to pick the cotton, so the Coleman family worked together in the fields during the harvest. ¹

In 1901, Bessie’s happy life took a dramatic hit. George Coleman left his family. He had become fed up with the racial barriers that existed in Waxahachie and all across the state of Texas. He returned to Oklahoma, or Indian Territory as it was called then, to find better opportunities. Unable to convince his wife and children to go with him, he left with a heavy heart. Soon after Bessie's father left, her remaining older brothers also left home, leaving Susan Coleman with four girls under the age of nine. ¹

Bessie saved her money and then in 1910 took her savings and enrolled in the Colored Agricultural and Normal University in Langston, Oklahoma. Bessie completed only one term before she ran out of money and was forced to return to Waxahachie. She continued her former life working as a laundress in the small Texas town. ¹

In 1915, at the age of twenty-three, she set out to stay with her brother, Walter, in Chicago while she looked for work. All she wanted was a chance to “amount to something”. ¹ Among her many gentlemen friends was Claude Glenn, a much older man whom she married in 1917, but lived with only briefly. ³ By 1918, Bessie's mother Susan and her three younger sisters, Georgie, Elois and Nilus, had joined Bessie and her brothers in Chicago. By 1920, 90% of the African American population of Chicago lived on the South Side, between Twelfth and Thirty-ninth streets on the north and south and Lake Michigan and Wentworth Avenue on the east and west. It was a pretty well-balanced place where the wealthy, the well-educated, the middle class, the poor and the hard-working co-existed in generally law abiding harmony. Bessie lived with her brothers Walter, a Pullman porter, and John, frequently unemployed. She decided that she would become a beautician to make ends meet. ¹

Walter and John had been serving in France during World War I and returned safely; Bessie, taking her cue from brother John's teasing claims that French women were superior to African American women because they could fly and had careers, decided she would become a flier. ^{1, 2}

Having secured funding from several sources and received a passport with English and French visas, Bessie departed for France in November of 1919. She completed in seven months, a ten month course at the Ecole d'Aviation des Freres Caudon at Le Crotoy in the Somme. Learning to fly in a French Nieuport Type 82, Bessie's schooling included "tail spins, banking and looping the loop." She received her license from the renowned Federation Aeronautique Internationale (FAI) on June 15, 1921. Her birthplace was listed as Atlanta, Texas, but her age was listed as 25 (the figure she had given passport authorities in Chicago) rather than 29 that she actually was. The license did not indicate that Bessie was the first black woman to ever earn a license from the prestigious FAI nor that she was the only woman of the sixty-two candidates to earn FAI licenses during that six-month period. ¹ Flying as entertainment could provide financial benefits for an aviator but required skills that Bessie did not possess. Once again, Bessie departed for France, arriving in Le Havre on February 28, 1922. She received advanced training in the Nieuport, returning to New York in August. ¹

"Bessie realized that to make a living at flying she would first have to dramatize herself, like Roscoe Turner, the great speed pilot who wore a lion-tamer's costume when he flew and took his pet lion, Gilmore, along in the second cockpit," wrote Doris Rich in Queen Bess: Daredevil Aviator. "Speaking to reporters, Bessie now began to draw upon everything at her command —- her good looks, her sense of theater, and her eloquence—to put her own campaign of self-dramatization into high gear.... Everything she told them was purposefully selected to enhance the image of a new, exciting, adventurous personality." ³

Her first appearance was in an air show on September 3, 1922 at Curtiss Field near New York City. The show, sponsored by Robert Abbott and the Chicago Defender, billed Bessie as "the world's greatest woman flyer." More shows followed around the country including Memphis and Chicago. On June 19, 1925, Bessie made her flying debut in Texas at a Houston auto racetrack renamed Houston Aerial Transport Field in honor of the occasion. ¹

She flirted briefly with a movie career and traveled to California to earn money for a plane of her own. ¹ Although Coleman eventually succeeded, the only one she could afford was an ancient Curtiss JN-4, priced at $400. Days after receiving the plane, she was flying from Santa Monica, California to an exhibition in central Los Angeles in February of 1923, when it stalled at 300 feet, nose-dived, and smashed into the ground. She spent the next three months in the hospital with a broken leg, broken ribs, and several serious lacerations. ³

Discouraged by the loss of her only plane, her lengthy hospitalization, and continuing managerial problems, Coleman spent the next 18 months in Chicago ³ formulating a new plan. It was another two years before she finally succeeded in lining up a series of lectures and exhibition flights in Texas. Once there, she defied not only racial barriers but gender barriers as well. ¹

Bessie left for a series of lectures in black theaters in Georgia and Florida. After two months in Florida, she opened a beauty shop in Orlando to hasten her accumulation of funds to start the long awaited aviation school. Using borrowed planes Bessie continued exhibition flying and occasional parachute jumping. As she had often done in other U.S. locations, Bessie refused to perform unless the audiences were desegregated and everyone attending used the same gates. ¹

At the end of April in 1926, Bessie's Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company Jenny (JN-4 with an OX-5 engine) arrived in Jacksonville. On the evening of April 30th, she and her mechanic took the plane up for a test flight. ¹ The highlight of her performance the next day was to be a spectacular parachute jump from a speeding plane at 2,500 feet. ³ At 3,500 feet with Wills in the front seat, the controls jammed and the plane unexpectedly plummeted toward earth. Coleman, who wasn't wearing a seat-belt so she could peer over the cockpit to study the contours of the field below, fell out of the cockpit and to her death. ^{2, 3}

Wills tried but failed to regain control of the aircraft, and died instantly when it hit the ground. Although the wreckage of the plane was badly burned, it was later discovered that a wrench used to service the engine had slid into the gearbox and jammed it, causing the plane to spin out of control. Experts noted at the time that gears in more modern planes had a protective coating —- an accident like this need not have happened. ³

On May 2, 1926, thousands of mourners —- among them hundreds of schoolchildren who had heard Coleman lecture on the glories of aviation —- attended a memorial service in Jacksonville. Three days later her remains arrived in Chicago, where thousands more attended a funeral at the city's Pilgrim Baptist Church.

Her dream of a flying school for African American's became a reality when William J. Powell established the Bessie Coleman Aero Club in Los Angeles, California in 1929. As a result of being affiliated, educated or inspired directly or indirectly, by the Bessie Coleman Aero Club, flyers like the Five Blackbirds, the Flying Hobos (James Banning and Thomas Allen), the Tuskegee Airmen, Cornelius Coffey, John "Brown Condor" Robinson, Willa Brown and Harold Hurd continued to make Bessie Coleman's dream a reality. ¹

"Because of Bessie Coleman," wrote Lieutenant William J. Powell in Black Wings, "we have overcome that which was worse than racial barriers. We have overcome the barriers within ourselves and dared to dream." ³

A new organization known as the Bessie Coleman Aviators Club, open to women pilots of all races, was founded in 1977 —- some 50 years after her death —- by a group of black women pilots from the Chicago area. Every April, on the anniversary of Coleman's death, the Bessie Coleman Aviators, together with pilots from the Chicago American Pilots Association and the Negro Airmen International, fly low over Lincoln Cemetery in the Chicago suburb of Blue Island to drop flowers on her grave. As an additional tribute to the life and courage of the world's first black woman pilot, in 1990, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley renamed Old Mannheim Road at O'Hare Airport "Bessie Coleman Drive." In 1992 he proclaimed May 2nd "Bessie Coleman Day in Chicago." Shortly thereafter, Coleman received national recognition when the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp commemorating her extraordinary life and accomplishments. ³