Bessie Coleman came back from France a century ago, having realized her dream. A manicurist in a Chicago barbershop, she returned from that trip as the first African American woman airplane pilot and possessed by a mission to share what she’d learned: “In the air there is no prejudice,” she said.
Considering the racial hatreds at ground level, what she accomplished in the few years she was fated to live is barely believable. Bessie Coleman Drive at O’Hare International Airport is named in her honor. Yet the true story of her life was long elusive because she rarely gave an interview without mixing fact and fancy, as she chose to be seen on a given day.
She told a New York Times reporter that she learned to fly as a Red Cross nurse in World War I. She made public appearances in the long leather coat and goggles perched atop a leather helmet that the Canadian air force wore.
In fact, it was her brothers who were the veterans of World War I. So here is Bessie’s story as biographer Doris Rich reconstructed it in “Queen Bess” — for so was Coleman regarded by her legion of fans.
She was born in 1892, the oldest of Susan Coleman’s children. Because Bessie’s father deserted the family, her mother worked as a cook and housekeeper for a white family in Waxahachie, Texas. Bessie took charge of her siblings, and her mother, though illiterate, borrowed books from a wagon-born library that toured the countryside.
Among those Bessie read to her sisters at bedtime was “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Written by an abolitionist, it was popular among progressive whites, but less so among Blacks because it depicted docile slaves.
“I’ll never be a Topsy or an Uncle Tom,” Bessie said after closing the cover. Years later, Bessie announced her ambition “to make Uncle Tom’s cabin into a hanger for a flying school.”
By 1919, she was living with two brothers who’d moved to Chicago and seen France as members of the 370th Regiment of the Illinois National Guard. She wanted to do something with her life, but didn’t know what until John Coleman inadvertently gave her a clue.
Like many siblings, the Colemans could oscillate between affection and teasing. One day John showed up at Duncan’s barbershop on East 36th Street, where Bessie was a manicurist.
French women are different, he tauntingly proclaimed. You’re never going to fly, “not like those women I saw in France.”
Smiling back at him, Bessie replied: “That’s it! You just called it for me.”
Getting to France and paying for flight instruction on a manicurist’s earnings was a hurdle she couldn’t have cleared except for Robert Abbot, publisher of the Chicago Defender. He’d issued a call for the Great Migration that inspired her brothers, myriad southern Blacks, and eventually Bessie’s mother and sisters, to move North.
Abbot saw Bessie’s quest as a worthy cause and great copy. Stories about overcoming discrimination sold newspapers. Along with Jesse Binga, a wealthy banker, Abbot helped finance Bessie’s adventure and the Defender reported it, occasionally hyping chapters with headlines like:
“Aviatrix Must Sign Away Life To Learn Trade”
Below that headline was an account of how the Ecole d’Aviation des Freres Caudron required students of France’s premier flying school to sign a release of liability should they be injured or killed.
The Defender similarly ballyhooed her 1922 Chicago debut at the Checkerboard Airdrome at Roosevelt Road and First Avenue in Maywood. Two thousand spectators paid (adults $1, children 50 cents) to see Bessie toss and turn the airplane, feigning she had lost control of it. Then she performed a figure eight in honor of the 8th Infantry, parent unit of the 370th Regiment.
Bessie’s mother was there, as was her sister Nilus and 8-year-old nephew, Arthur. “That’s my aunt!” the boy said. “A real live aviator!”
Passenger-carrying airlines had yet to appear, but stunt flying gave Bessie an income and an offer to make a movie. Still, she walked off the set when she saw the script called for her to initially appear in ragged old clothes. She refused to burlesque the poverty of her youth.
“No Uncle Tom stuff for me!” Bessie told J.A. Jackson, a Billboard magazine columnist.
Disaster struck as she was flying to a Los Angeles show in 1923. Her engine stalled, and the aircraft crashed. From a hospital bed she telegraphed friends and fans: “Tell them all that as soon as I can walk I’m going to fly! And my faith in aviation and the use it will serve in fulfilling the destiny of my people isn’t shaken at all.”
As her plane was beyond repair, she could only keep her bookings when she could borrow someone else’s. She began missing them and discarding one agent after another. In 1924 TOBA, the top Black entertainment agency, declared a boycott on Bessie, according to the Defender.
She was famous, but frustrated. Then in 1926, she heard that used airplanes were bought and sold at Love Field in Dallas. Bessie bought a well-worn Jenny two-seater. She’d opened a beauty parlor in Orlando, Florida, hoping it would finance her return to flying, Rich reports.
She hired William Wills, a white mechanic, to deliver her airplane, and on April 30, the two went aloft to have a look at the Jacksonville, Florida, racetrack where she would perform. Bessie had added a trick to her routine: stepping out on to a wing, jumping off, and parachuting to the ground.
Accordingly, Wills was in the front seat and Bessie in the rear seat, when a loose wrench got caught in the control mechanism. The Jenny turned over and Bessie fell out. Wills was killed in the ensuing crash.
A hundred Black voices softly hummed “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” as Bessie’s body was lifted into the baggage car of a train bound for Chicago, according to Rich.
An overflow crowd attended her funeral at Pilgrim Baptist Church. The Defender eulogized Bessie and Wills as a Black woman and white man united by the love of flight.
In 1931, the Challenger Pilots Association, a group of pioneering Black aviators, flew over Lincoln Cemetery at Kedzie Avenue and 123rd Street and dropped flowers on Bessie’s grave. Until they were too old to fly, the members regularly repeated the gesture. Each year, bright-colored blooms floated in the air where, like Bessie said, there is no prejudice.
