Who was Bessie Coleman?











Bessie Coleman, or Queen Bess as she was known, was a pioneer of her time. 
On June 15, 1926, Bessie Coleman forever cemented her place in the aviation community as one of The Firsts. 
She was the first American Female to earn an International Pilots License, and she was the first minority American Female to earn the International Pilots License.

Bessie Coleman became interested in flying after hearing her brothers who came home from serving in World War I talk about their time in France.  Her brother John teased her about how French women were allowed to fly planes and she was not. 
This teasing made Bessie want to be a pilot.  However as a minority woman in the United States of America, her mother was African American and her father was of Native American and African American decent.  Specifically he was of the Cherokee tribe.   Not only was Bessie Coleman’s ancestry comprised of two groups of very proud races, her ancestry would make her desire to become an aviator difficult to accomplish as she could not find a flight school to teach her.
 
Queen Bess was born in Atlanta, Texas in 1892.  She was educated at Langston University in Langston, Oklahoma and eventually moved to Chicago, Illinois where she began to explore learning to fly.  However, being a minority in the United States, Ms. Coleman found that no one in this country would teach her how to fly.  She met John Abbott, the publisher of a newspaper in Chicago, who encouraged her to go to France to learn to fly.

Ms. Coleman learned French and moved to Paris, France where she was accepted into the Coudron Brother’s School of Aviation in Le Crotoy, France.  She obtained an international pilot’s license from the Federation Aeronautique Internationale on June 15, 1921 becoming the world’s first African/Native American licensed aviator.  Ms. Coleman returned to the United States with the dream of opening a flight school that would be open to anyone who wanted to fly.

In order to raise money for a flight school, Queen Bess began performing barnstorming exhibitions at airshows around the country.  Her exhibitions allowed her to save enough money to purchase her own airplane.  A Jenny JN-4 which is an open-cockpit airplane.  Unfortunately her dream would not be realized.   In 1926 Queen Bess and her co-pilot were killed when she was overflying and surveying Paxon field in Jacksonville, Florida, prior to an exhibition flight.   Her open-cockpit airplane malfunctioned flipping upside down.  She fell out of the plane to her death.  Her co-pilot was unable to gain control of the airplane and was killed when it crashed.

-- Bessie Coleman Aerospace Legacy (BCAL)