Life of a Favorite Famous World-Life Figure

Bessie Coleman was born January 26, 1892 in Atlanta, Texas, the tenth of thirteen children.  Her father, a Native American, and her mother, an African American, were sharecroppers.  Early in her childhood, Bessie and her family moved to Waxahachie, Texas, where she grew up picking cotton and doing laundry for customers with her mother. Because of a lot of segregation and difficulties in the South, Bessie’s father decided to move the family to “Indian Territory” in Oklahoma where he believed he could have a better chance for his family.  Bessie’s mother didn’t want to live on a reservation and stayed in Texas with Bessie and many of her sisters. Bessie walked four miles to school when she went.  Most of the time she borrowed books from a traveling library and learned enough to graduate from high school excelling in math.  She went to study at the Colored Agricultural and Normal University (now Langston University) in Langston, Oklahoma.  She couldn’t afford to pay, so she only finished one semester. In 1915, Bessie moved to Chicago with her two brothers.  She attended beauty school and became a manicurist.  Her brother, John, teased her about the women in France being superior to women of Chicago’s South Side because they knew how to fly.  After his teasing and seeing films and reading of flight, Bessie wanted to be an aviator.  She tried to get into flight school, but they wouldn’t take her because she was Black and a woman. After being turned down by all American flight schools, she met Robert Abbott, publisher of the African American newspaper the Chicago Defender and one of the first African American millionaires.  He told her to move to France where she could get a pilot’s license. Bessie quit her job as a manicurist and managed a chili parlor to make more money.  She also studied French at night. With money she saved and additional money from Abbott and his friends, Bessie Coleman sailed to France.  She attended the Caudron Brother’s School of Aviation in Le Crotoy, France.  On June 15, 1921 after seven months Coleman got her pilot’s license from the Federation Aeronautique Internationale.  She trained some more and then returned to the United States in September 1921. Bessie Coleman again tried to get into American flight schools, but they rejected her. Her goal at this time was to start an African American flight school.  She had to make money to do this, so she returned to France in February 1922 to learn how to be a stunt pilot. On September 3, 1922, at Glenn Curtiss Field in Garden City, New York, Bessie flew in her first air show.  It was sponsored by the Chicago Defender and made her a celebrity.  She then began to tour the country giving exhibits, flight lessons, and lectures.gates. While preparing for a show in Jacksonville, Florida, Bessie Coleman was thrown from her plane and killed. Her funeral was presided over by Ida B. Wells and attended by many very important African Americans of that time. Since Bessie Coleman’s death Bessie Coleman Aero Clubs sprang up throughout the country.  On Labor Day, 1931, they sponsored the first all-African American Air Show and each year they fly over her grave.  In 1990 mayor, Richard Daley renamed Old Mannheim Rd to Bessie Coleman Dr at O’Hare Chicago airport. In 1992 a commemorative stamp was made in her honor.