The pioneering aviator Bessie Coleman will appear on U.S. quarters next year - learn her story at
Having soared free of the constraints of her birth, she fell from the sky at the height of her career.was the first female African American pilot, the first African American to receive a pilot’s license, and the first American woman to get an international pilot’s license; impressively, she broke all that ground within two decades of the Wright brothers’ epochal first flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903.
Not content with the scant opportunities afforded her in Texas, in 1915 Coleman joined the tens of thousands of other southern African Americans moving north as part of the, settling in Chicago with her two older brothers. She found work as a manicurist in a barber shop on the city’s South Side. One of her brothers had served overseas in World War I and made a habit of teasing his ambitious sister: “Those women in France fly airplanes.” And with that, Coleman knew what she wanted to do.
With financial help from Abbott, Coleman learned French and went to France, where she had enrolled in a flight school. Once there, however, she was rejected; two female students had recently died, so the school was no longer admitting women. Undeterred, Coleman found another school, and after seven months of training, received her international pilot’s license in 1921.
Before she could do that, she needed her own plane. For her exhibitions, she flew rented or borrowed planes, but she aspired to have her own so she could teach other African Americans to fly. In 1923, an Oklahoma company bought her one on the condition that she drop their advertisements from it while in the air. Coleman quickly crashed it, in Los Angeles, incurring a broken leg and ribs.
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