The theme of this year’s Women’s History Month is “Science, Technology, Engineering and Math” (STEM). We’ll take a look at four women of color who excelled in these fields.
Bessie Coleman soared from a life of poverty, across the skies and into history as the first Black female aviator–high dreams for a girl born in the cruel confines of the Jim Crow South.
Coleman was born in Atlanta, Texas, on Jan. 26, 1892, the 10th of 13 children born to sharecroppers George–who was part Cherokee–and Susan Coleman into a world of “no you can’t.” Jim Crow laws meant that Blacks couldn’t vote, couldn’t ride in rail cars with whites and couldn’t use public facilities like restrooms, drinking fountains or even park benches. Black children took long walks to schoolrooms that were nothing more than one-room shacks, often without books to read, paper or pencils. Despite all of that, Bessie Coleman was an excellent student who loved to read and excelled at math.
George Coleman, tired of the racism in Texas, left the family in 1901 and headed to Oklahoma, which then was known as “Indian Territory.” He was unable to convince his wife and children to go with him. Soon after, Bessie Coleman’s older brothers also left Texas in search of a better life. When Coleman turned 18, she headed to Oklahoma and enrolled in the Oklahoma Colored Agricultural and Normal University, now called Langston University. However, her money ran out after one term, and she returned home.
When she was 23, she headed north to Chicago to live with her two brothers, but the North offered little more than the South did for a young Black woman who had race and gender against her. Coleman remained determined to “amount to something.”
She became a manicurist, working in the many barbershops in an area on Chicago’s South Side known as “The Stroll.” Coleman was still a voracious reader, and one of her idols was Robert Abbott, editor and publisher of the powerful Black newspaper the Chicago Defender, and one of America’s first Black millionaires.
In 1918, Coleman’s mother and three younger sisters moved to Chicago.
Soldiers were coming back from World War I with grand stories of adventures in the skies. Coleman’s brother, who had served in France, often chided her with tales of French women flyers. But there were very few women of any race in the United States who had a pilot’s license and most who did were wealthy and white. Coleman decided that she too would fly.
Not surprisingly, every flying school she approached about taking lessons turned her down because she was Black and a woman. On the advice of Abbott, she decided to go to France and learn how to fly.
She learned French, emptied her savings and, with help from Abbott and others, left for Paris on Nov. 20, 1920. She enrolled at the Ecole d’Aviation des Freres Caudon at le Crotoy in the Somme, completing the 10-month course in seven months. She learned her craft in a French Nieuport Type 82 with a steering system that consisted of a vertical stick that had the thickness of a baseball bat and a rubber ball under the pilot’s feet.
On June 15, 1921, Coleman officially became not only the first Black female aviator to receive a license from the prestigious Federation Aeronautique Internationale, but the first American woman to hold an international pilot’s license. She would spend another three months in additional training before heading for New York on Sept. 16, 1921, aboard the S.S. Manchuria. She would return the following year to receive advanced training and further hone her skills. Coleman was now ready to take to the skies.
She made her flying debut on Sept. 3, 1922, at an air show at Curtis Field near New York City. The show was sponsored by Abbott. Coleman was billed in the Chicago Defender as “the world’s greatest woman flyer.” She did indeed “amount to something.” She was performing in shows around the country and also had a dream of opening a school for aviators.
She went back to Texas, making her flying debut there at a Houston auto racetrack on June 19, 1925. Next, it was off to California to raise money for her own plane, which she promptly crashed. She returned to Chicago and would spend the next two years lining up exhibition flights and lectures. At Love Field in Dallas, she put a down payment on a plane.
Coleman embarked on a series of tours in Black theaters in Georgia and Florida. While there, she opened a beauty shop in Orlando to raise money for her planned aviation school, while at the same time, she continued exhibition flying and occasional parachute jumping. She refused to perform for segregated audiences and insisted that everyone be allowed to use the same gates.
With her savings and additional monies from wealthy patrons, she made the final payment on her plane in Dallas and made arrangements to have it flown to Jacksonville, Fla., for a May 1 engagement.
On the evening of April 30, 1926, Coleman and her mechanic took the plane up for a test flight, but the plane malfunctioned. The mechanic who was piloting the aircraft lost control and Coleman, who was not wearing a seat belt, was thrown from the open cockpit several hundred feet to her death. Thousands of mourners filed past her coffin to pay their respects to the little girl from Texas who was determined to “amount to something.”
Coleman’s dream of a flying school was realized when William J. Powell established the Bessie Coleman Aero Club in Los Angeles. In 1931, the Challenger Pilots’ Association of Chicago began an annual flyover at Chicago’s Lincoln Cemetery to honor Coleman. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley renamed Old Mannheim Road at O’Hare Airport “Bessie Coleman Drive.” In 1995, the U.S. Postal Service issued a Bessie Coleman stamp in honor of the world’s first African-American pilot.
Activities
- Look it up: Use the Internet or other reference source to learn more about the life of Bessie Coleman and other African-Americans in the aviation field.
- Talk About It: What makes a good pilot? Make a list of skills and subjects that you feel are necessary for the job. Why are these specific skills important?
- Write it Down: Make a list of jobs and the math or science skills needed to perform the tasks. What are your favorite areas of math or science?
This Week in Black History
- March 5, 1770: Crispus Attucks, an escaped slave, is the first man killed during the Boston Massacre, an event that led to the American Revolutionary War.
- March 6, 1857: The Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision denies citizenship to Blacks and denies Congress the power to stop slavery in federal territories.
- March 6, 1957: Ghana gains its independence from Great Britain.
- March 10, 1913: Harriet Tubman dies in Auburn, N.Y.