American aviator Bessie Coleman is born - January 26th, 1892

On this day in 1892, pioneering aviator Elizabeth “Bessie” Coleman was born in Atlanta, Texas.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
Hello and Welcome to This Day in History Class, a
show that pays tribute to people of the past by
sharing their stories. Today, I'm Gabelusier, and in this episode,
we're celebrating the life of Bessie Coleman, a gutsy black

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pilot who overcame gender bias and racism to make history
both on the ground and in the air. The day
was January twenty sixth, eighteen ninety two. Pioneering aviator Elizabeth

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Bessie Coleman was born in Atlanta, Texas. She pursued her
dream of becoming a pilot during an era of severe
racial prejudice and Jim Crow laws, and when her own
country stood in the way of her dream, she went
to France and learned to fly there. Her determination paid
off in nineteen twenty one, when she made history as

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the first African American woman and the first woman of
Native American descent to become a licensed pilot. Bessie Coleman
was born in a small North Texas town at the
turn of the twentieth century, roughly a decade before airplanes
were even invented. She was the tenth of thirteen children
born to a couple named George and Susan Coleman. Her

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mother was an African American maid and her father was
a sharecropper of African American and Cherokee ancestry. They moved
to Waxahachie, Texas when Bessie was two, but after about
seven years there, her father was ready to move again.
He was fed up with the indignities of segregation and
believed the family would face less abuse living among the

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Cherokee in Oklahoma, where Jim Crow laws had yet to
be enacted. Bessie's mother, however, was unconvey vinced by the
plan and decided that she and the children would stick
it out and wax a Hatchee For the rest of
her teenage years, Bessie Coleman picked cotton alongside her mother
and washed laundry to earn extra money for herself. By

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the time she was eighteen, she'd saved enough to begin
taking classes at the Colored Agricultural and Normal University in Langston, Oklahoma,
but the money didn't go as far as she had hoped,
and she wound up having to drop out after just
one semester. In nineteen fifteen, Coleman joined the Great Migration
and headed north with millions of other African Americans. She

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settled in Chicago, where her older brothers lived, and was
followed soon after by her mother and the rest of
the family. She got a job as a manicurist at
the age of twenty three, and while it was a
welcome change from her hard scrabble upbringing in the oppressive South,
she still longed for more. I want to find a
bigger life, she said. I want to amount to something.

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Coleman spent the next five years trying to figure out
what that something might be, and in nineteen twenty she
finally got her answer. Strangely enough, it came in the
form of a taunt from her brother John. He had
served in the military during World War One, and after
returning home, he told his sister stories about the women
pilots he'd encountered in France. Sometimes he even teased her

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about it, pointing out that here she was trying to
elevate herself and getting nowhere, while over in France women
were literally soaring to new heights. Coleman took the insult
as a challenge and replied, that's it. You just called
it for me. With her new goal in sight, she
took a second job to raise money for tuition and

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sent out applications to flight schools across the country. She
was rejected each and every time because she was both
African American and a woman, but Coleman was relentless, as
she famously declared, quote, every no takes me closer to
a yes. In pursuit of that elusive yes, Coleman sought

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advice from Robert s Abbot, an influential newspaper publisher in
Chicago and one of the first self made black millionaires
in the country. Abbot could tell she was serious about
becoming a pilot, and he also knew her story would
sell lots of papers if she succeeded. With that in mind,
he recommended that she seek training in France, where black

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people were afforded more opportunity than in the US, and
promised to report on her progress in his newspaper. Because
her applications would need to be written in French, Coleman
started taking French classes in the evenings. Once she had
a decent grasp of the language, she applied to several
well respected flight schools and was ultimately accepted by the

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Caudron Brothers School of Aviation. She traveled to France in
late November of nineteen twenty and began learning to fly
the Newport eighty two, a dual controlled training plane to
f during World War One. After seven months in the cockpit,
Bessie Coleman earned her pilot's license on June fifteenth, nineteen

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twenty one, becoming the first African American woman to do so.
She hoped to make a living off her new skill
by performing as a barnstormer, an exhibition flyer who performed
aerial stunts at air shows. However, she quickly realized she'd
need more training for that, so she logged another two
months worth of lessons in France and then spent ten

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weeks in Berlin flying under the instruction of German ace pilots.
In the spring of nineteen twenty two, Coleman made her
triumphant return to the US, where her achievement was hailed
by black and white newspapers. Her first public air show
was held on September third of that year in Garden City,
Long Island. According to one Kansas reporter, as many as

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three thousand people turned out for the event, watching in
awe as Coleman flew thousands of feet above the ground,
pulling off barrel rolls, loops, and spins as if she'd
been flying all her life. Over the next five years,
the intrepid pilot would perform at countless air shows throughout
the country, earning nicknames such as Queen Bess and Brave Bessie.

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One of her most daring acts involved another pilot taking
the controls while she walked across the wings of the
plane and then parachuted safely to the ground. The stunts
didn't always go as planned, though, and on one occasion,
Coleman broke a leg and three ribs when her plane
stalled and crashed. The accident left her grounded for a
few months, but it didn't put her off flying, and

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she soon returned to barnstorming as fearless as ever. As
her celebrity status grew, Coleman also began using her fame
to advocate for inclusivity in American society. She refused to
perform in exhibitions that required black people to use a
separate entrance and to sit apart from the rest of
the crowd, and she frequently gave speeches at churches, theaters,

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and schools, in which she encouraged other African Americans to
take up flying. The air is the only place free
from prejudice, she once told a reporter, and you've never
lived until you've flown. Coleman's dream was to raise enough
money to open her own flight school so that more
women like her could experience the same freedom she felt

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in the air. Blacks should not have to experience the
difficulties I have faced, she said, So I decided to
open a flying school and teach other black women to fly,
for accidents may happen, and this way there would be
someone to take my place. Coleman's statement would prove tragically
prescient in the days ahead. On April thirtieth, nineteen twenty six,

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she took flight over Jacksonville, Florida, in a Curtis j
N four, a plane she had recently purchased after years
of saving. She had asked her mechanic, William Wills, to
pilot the plane that day so that she could scope
out the terrain below in preparation for a parachute jump
scheduled for the following day. Roughly ten minutes into the flight,

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in unsecured wrench somehow got lodged in the control gears,
causing the plane to lurch into an uncontrollable dive. Coleman,
who was not wearing her seat belt, was thrown from
the plane several thousand feet in the air, and when
it crashed and exploded, William Wills died as well. A
funeral service was held for Coleman in Florida before her

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remains were returned to Chicago, where ten thousand mourners came
to pay their last respects. The ceremony was attended by
several prominent black figures, including Ida B. Wells, a renowned
journalist and activist who had led an anti lynching crusade
in the eighteen nineties. In the years ahead, Coleman's adopted

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town of Chicago would continue to honor her memory. In
nineteen thirty one, the Challenger Air Pilots Association began flying
over her grave each year to drop flowers, and around
the same time, I'm a Black engineer and pilot named
William J. Powell established the Bessie Coleman Aarow Club. Its
purpose was to fulfill Coleman's dream of bringing aviation opportunities

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to the black community, and it welcomed both men and
women alike. I'm Gabe Luesier and hopefully you now know
a little more about history today than you did yesterday.
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(09:35):
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here again soon for another day in History class.