The extraordinary story of Bessie Coleman, the first Black woman to hold a pilot’s licence

The “only one in the world” is what the Los Angeles Times said about Bessie Coleman a century ago. It launched me on a quest to trace the breathtaking moxie of an adventurous, brave, Black woman who’d been born the daughter of an enslaved woman, and who would ascend to fly aeroplanes before most Americans had ever seen one in the sky, earning her the moniker Queen Bess.

I am a Boeing 737 captain for United Airlines. I stand on the shoulders of Bessie Coleman, and I became obsessed with her extraordinary ride from Texas labourer to world-famous pioneer aviator largely because her miraculous story seemed hidden in plain sight for nearly 100 years.

Coleman stood at the nexus of the dawn of aviation, as well as the dawn of the Great Migration. Moving to Chicago from Texas in 1915, Coleman rode the crest of the very first wave of the movement of six million African Americans from the agricultural South to the industrial North.

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Aeroplanes in the 1920s were new-fangled machines, and they were being used in novel ways – crop dusting, barnstorming, delivering mail. Coleman was hired to shower beachgoers with leaflets advertising Coast Tires. Back then, roads were often dirt or gravel and tyres, changed frequently, were an indispensable part of automobile upkeep. 

After studying French in a Chicago Berlitz night school for three years, Coleman boarded an ocean liner bound for France and nearly two years before Amelia Earhart, became the first American to earn a civilian French brevet (pilot’s licence). This was at a time when American women had just earned the right to vote while US troops had returned from the deadliest global conflict in history and the Spanish flu pandemic was around the corner.

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In 1919, shortly before Bessie Coleman left Chicago to go to France, the Red Summer bloodied the entire US. Seventeen-year-old Eugene Williams was on a raft in Lake Michigan and accidentally floated into the whites-only bathing area. He was stoned to death by whites who threw so many rocks from the shore that Williams and the raft sank to the bottom of the lake. Tulsa was burned to the ground and as the ruins smouldered, post-emancipation Jim Crow laws forced millions of southern Blacks, including Coleman’s own parents, into sharecropping, poverty and illiteracy. 

The only flight instructors in the world who would teach a Black woman to fly in 1920 were French and German aviators who had survived the twin atrocities of war and plague. Tens of thousands of primitive biplanes swarmed the skies above northern Europe during the war in what became known as dogfights. These first combat pilots taught Coleman what they had learned; lethal ways to force nimble, squirrely wings to gain advantage over an opponent and then shoot a rival out of the air like skeet. 

Coleman then took those death-defying manoeuvres and looped and spun the teachings into a breathtaking airshow. Strapping on knee-high boots and performing in a uniform that she designed for herself, she was the embodiment of a swashbuckling daredevil who created stunts that left her audience of thousands gobstruck. 

Coleman’s desire to fly launched her into an epic David-and-Goliath sized battle. She was a first in a world of men, using a technology that had been burnished in the horrors of war. Danger was a constant companion in these primitive contraptions, yet Coleman covered herself, draping her wings with purpose, soaring upon the honour and valour that gave reason to a soldier’s sacrifice.

She envisioned the future, then carved a path where there was none, smashing through social roadblocks and hovering above scarcity, racial discrimination and sexism; she appeared to me to be superhuman.

I had always wanted to fly a plane, yet I had never found Bessie Coleman in any textbook in college, nor graduate school. American Airlines captain Jenny Beatty gave me a coffee mug with Coleman’s picture on it before I quit my corporate job to go to flight school. Once I learned that Coleman used her skill to barnstorm this country, spreading her own gospel of flight from coast to coast in the 1920s, I was convinced that I too could fly. 

I believe that Coleman’s agency, her ownership of her true desire, as well as her urgent dedication to pursue that one true thing, is what gave laser-like definition to her life’s work.

Coleman defined herself on an international stage, becoming the personification of what she wanted people to see. Before she uttered a word or took off into the blue, her skill and bravado kept audiences talking. 

More than anyone I have ever come across, Bessie Coleman truly earned a pair of wings.

A Pair of Wings by Carole Hopson is out 22 September (Henry Holt, £16.99).

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