Amaze Yourself With the Unbelievable Story of Bessie Coleman, the Black Aviator Who Wowed the Nation With Her High-Flying Achievements

Long before the Tuskegee Airmen, Coleman inspired a generation of pilots to take to the skies

Victor Luckerson

June 2025

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It felt like a homecoming. Thousands of onlookers cheered wildly as daredevil pilot Bessie Coleman arced her Curtiss Jenny biplane into a spiral above a Houston field. The weather was scorching, but Coleman kept her cool as she cruised through loop-de-loops and gunned across the blue skies at 75 miles per hour. The aviator was already a colossal figure to many in the audience. In recent years, her globe-trotting escapades had taken her to Los Angeles, Chicago, Paris, Amsterdam and beyond. The Chicago Defender had declared her the “Queen of the Air.” Now, back home in Texas on June 19, 1925, she was finally achieving her true aerial ambitions, as a main attraction in the first-ever all-Black air show in the state—and doing it on Juneteenth, no less. “I am a native Texan,” she told a newspaper reporter, “and proud that a Texan is the only Negro aviatrix in the world.” 

While the Tuskegee Airmen have become icons in the history of American aviation, fewer people know the story of Bessie Coleman, the Black pilot who charted a course for them and many others in the 1920s. Known as “Brave Bessie” or “Queen Bess,” Coleman boasted a fearlessness that made her a perfect fit for a Juneteenth celebration. The holiday got its start in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865, when enslaved African Americans learned of their freedom following the Civil War. Coleman, herself born to sharecropper parents in slavery’s shadow, took that promise of freedom airborne. The Juneteenth show in Texas was the culmination of an unlikely rise, literally to the clouds, for a Black woman whose courage still astounds a century later. 

Coleman was born in 1892 in Atlanta, Texas, and moved to the town of Waxahachie when she was a toddler, according to her biographer Doris L. Rich. Her father, who was part Native American, left the family for Oklahoma when Bessie was young. Money was tight, and education was hard to come by. Coleman picked cotton for months each year; after the eighth grade, she worked as a washerwoman and watched over her younger sisters. Still, she yearned for more.

When her older brother invited her to come live with him on Chicago’s South Side, she leapt at the chance. She went to beauty school in the city and soon became a manicurist. Pretty and quick-witted, Coleman preferred to work at barbershops, where she would charm male customers for generous tips and provide manicures to proud patrons in the front window. She also befriended Robert Abbott, the founder and publisher of the Chicago Defender, the nation’s leading Black newspaper, who would become a valued mentor. A Defender news item in 1918 praised her as a “shining example” of a “progressive up-to-date young woman.”

But Coleman was not content to be a window prize. One day, her older brother John, a World War I veteran, came into the barbershop and proclaimed that Black women would never be able to fly airplanes. Coleman took the insult as a challenge and soon began researching where she could pursue training. She found that no white pilots in the area were willing to teach her. Military training was also a non-starter, since the U.S. Army Air Service (a forerunner to the Air Force) did not accept women. So Coleman expanded her vision. She began studying French and saving money for a passage to Europe, where women pilots were not so disdained. Abbott, reportedly keen to mine Black success stories to help sell newspapers, urged her on and even provided financial backing. On November 20, 1920, at the age of 28, Coleman embarked on the SS Imperator for France. She would train at the École d’Aviation des Frères Caudron at Le Crotoy, one of France’s most prestigious flight schools.

Coleman spent seven months learning loop-de-loops and banking turns in a Nieuport 82, a French biplane used for training. The planes were rickety contraptions with no brakes that belched castor oil and had to be dragged to a stop with a tail skid after landing. Every pilot knew how dangerous flying was, and Coleman herself watched a classmate die in an accident while training in France. But she was determined to prove that she—and people who looked like her—could conquer this new frontier. “I thought it my duty to risk my life to learn aviating and to encourage flying among men and women of the Race,” she said. “I made up my mind to try; I tried and was successful.”

In June 1921, Coleman received her license from the renowned Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, becoming the first Black woman to earn the distinction. The license granted her the ability to fly anywhere in the world. Word of Coleman’s unusual achievement soon reached the States. When she returned to America in September 1921, she became a full-blown celebrity. A gaggle of reporters awaited her arrival in New York on the SS Manchuria. A series of profiles in the Chicago Defender soon followed. When she attended a popular Broadway musical in Manhattan, the cast presented Coleman with an engraved silver cup, and the multiracial (but segregated) audience gave her a standing ovation.

Still, Coleman remained focused on her craft. Soon she was back in Europe, gaining more aerial training from leading aircraft experts in Amsterdam and Berlin. In the late summer of 1922, when she again returned to the States, she began conducting flying circuses in New York and Chicago and at various state fairs. Thousands of fans attended the events, which often cost between a quarter and 75 cents per head (around $14 today) and sometimes included a chance for attendees to go airborne themselves, with Coleman piloting. Her stylish clothes enhanced her showmanship. Her typical uniform was a custom leather coat, shiny boots and a leather helmet and goggles.

Coleman took her responsibility as a Black role model seriously. She hoped to launch a flight school to train Black pilots, especially women. She refused to perform for whites-only audiences, and while her shows often had segregated seating, she wouldn’t allow venues to force her Black fans to come through a separate entrance. A movie in which she was set to star fell apart when she got hold of the script and saw that she’d be portraying an ignorant, poverty-stricken Black woman. “No Uncle Tom stuff for me!” she told the film’s manager as she walked out on her contract.

But even with the glamour of celebrity, making a living was a constant challenge. As a member of an ensemble in her early aerial shows, she rarely raked in major profits. Planes were expensive, so she typically borrowed one from a local pilot for her shows. When she finally purchased her own plane in 1923, she crashed it in California on the way to a performance. The accident put her in the hospital for three months with fractured ribs and a broken leg. From her hospital bed, she insisted her career wasn’t over. “Tell them all that as soon as I can walk I’m going to fly!” she wrote in a telegram to well-wishers.  

After her injury, Coleman struggled to book gigs and cycled through a series of dubious managers. In Texas, though, things finally started to turn back around. She found fresh income by lecturing on her European exploits, which only boosted fans’ eagerness to see her take to the skies. The Juneteenth 1925 festivities cemented her comeback. When Coleman returned to the ground, one reporter observed, “more than a dozen pairs of hands were outstretched to help her from the machine.” For the rest of the summer, Coleman toured around Texas, even performing in Waxahachie, the town where she’d grown up. At one show she did a “wing walk,” stepping out onto the wing of the plane while airborne and leaping down into the crowd via parachute. She was invited to meet with Miriam Ferguson, the state’s first woman governor, at the Texas governor’s mansion. Coleman was planning to transition away from daredevil stunts and toward speaking and building her flight school for Black pilots. 

Less than a year later, however, tragedy struck. In April 1926, Coleman and another pilot named William Wills were conducting an aerial survey of an airfield in Jacksonville, Florida, where Coleman was prepping her next big show. At about 3,500 feet, Wills lost control of the plane, and the aircraft flipped upside-down. Coleman fell out of her seat and plummeted to her death; Wills died when the plane crashed into a nearby farm. Investigators later found that a wrench had jammed the plane’s control gears; rumors swirled that someone had sabotaged Coleman, but no further evidence of foul play ever emerged. Freak accidents were unfortunately common in the early days of aviation. 

Coleman’s death had the weight of a national tragedy, at least in Black America. More than 5,000 people attended her memorial service in Jacksonville. In Chicago, where Coleman had first pursued her dream of becoming a pilot, 10,000 mourners honored her coffin ahead of her funeral at Pilgrim Baptist Church. Congressman Oscar De Priest and civil rights activist Ida B. Wells participated in the homegoing ceremonies. The Defender published several obituaries, mournful but proud. Coleman’s eyes, one article reflected, were always “fixed on the stars.” 

Coleman was just 34 when she died, never achieving her lifelong dream of training a new generation of Black pilots. But her legacy as an aviator would touch many lives. Just three years after her death, a Los Angeles-based pilot and aviation entrepreneur named William Powell formed a flight school called the Bessie Coleman Aero Club. Among the group’s members was James Banning, who in 1932 made history with Thomas C. Allen, becoming the first Black pilots to conduct a transcontinental flight. In 1934, when Powell published a book about his own aerial exploits, he dedicated it to Coleman, who had “displayed courage equal to that of the most daring men.” 

Over the ensuing decades, Coleman’s legend quietly grew. When astronaut Mae Jemison became the first African American woman to travel to space, she carried a photograph of Coleman with her. Coleman also inspired Jesse L. Brown, the first African American pilot to complete Navy flight training. And this summer, Coleman will be featured in the renewed “Pioneers of Flight” gallery at the newly renovated Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, celebrating her role as a groundbreaking aviator and a thrilling barnstormer. 

“Do you know you have never lived until you have flown?” she mused once. “Of course, it takes one with courage, nerve and ambition.” 

Victor Luckerson | Read More

Victor Luckerson writes Run It Back, a newsletter about neglected black history, available at runitback.substack.com.