First black woman aviator inspired by WWI fliers

By Erin Blakemore
via the timeline.com web site

Aviator Bessie Coleman, circa 1920. “NEGRESS AN AIR PILOT,” blared the headline of the special dispatch to the Washington Post. It was Bessie Coleman’s first appearance on the national stage, and already she was being defined by her race first, her gender second, and her accomplishments last.

In the brief news item, Coleman struck a characteristically confident note. “I like flying,” said the 20-year-old, “and I’m going into the business.”

But in order to become the first African American and Native American pilot in the world, Coleman had to leave the United States.

She returned in the summer of 1922 with an international pilot’s license and ambitious plans, and found herself suddenly in the spotlight. Everyone wanted a piece of Bessie Coleman — but her story, inspirational and thrilling at first, would end in tragedy.

Born nearly a decade before the Wright brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk, Coleman was the 12th of 13 children, raised by a single, sharecropping mother in Waxahachie, Texas. She walked miles to a segregated school, did domestic work with her mother, and picked cotton with her siblings.

Coleman hated picking cotton and longed to leave the poverty of Waxahachie. In 1915, she got her wish when her mother let her move in with her brothers in Chicago to attend beauty school.

Spirited and smart, Coleman loved her new city. At the time, Chicago was a locus of Great Migration culture, and home to African American institutions like The Defender, a forward-thinking weekly newspaper aimed at black readers. Coleman worked in barbershops, where she listened to men gossip and soaked up news of the day, becoming increasingly intrigued by the idea of flight. Some of Coleman’s clients were veterans of World War I, the first war to use airplanes. She listened eagerly to their stories and started dreaming of her place in the cockpit.

Read the entire article on thetimeline.com web site.

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