06/17/2021
“Invention of Wings” by Sue Monk Kidd is another kind of flying. Thank you Ms. Kidd and Ms. Bessie Coleman for showing us how to fly.
Bessie Coleman became the first African American woman to earn a pilot’s license 100 years ago today.
In the early 20th century, Coleman—who also had Native American heritage—was barred from getting a pilot's license in the U.S. because of her race and gender. So she went to France.
After earning her license there, she returned to Chicago where she'd been working (as a manicurist) and got a job as a "barnstorming" pilot performing stunts at aviation shows. In the era of Jim Crow laws, Coleman would only perform in shows if the crowds were desegregated.
On Sept. 3, 1922, in a borrowed Curtiss JN-4D Jenny at Curtiss Field on Long Island, Coleman made the first public flight by an African American woman in the U.S. She's with the same type of plane in this photo from our National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution.
Coleman had nearly reached her goal of opening a flying school for African Americans when she was killed in a flight accident at age 34. After her death, William Powell established the Bessie Coleman Aero Flying Club and put together the first Black female air show team. When Mae Jemison, the first African American woman to go to space, launched on her first spaceflight, she carried Coleman’s picture with her.
