Who Is Bessie Coleman?

Why She Matters to Women's History

There is a certain peculiar grace in how history introduces itself to us. Not through textbooks or proclamations, but quietly, through a highway sign glimpsed from a car window on a cold Chicago morning.

I lived in Chicago through much of the nineties, driving a stretch of road known as the Bessie Coleman Expressway, a thoroughfare cutting northwest from the city toward Rockford. The Illinois Department of Transportation named it in her honor in 1995, a belated but necessary acknowledgment of what she had made possible. I drove that road often yet never once stopped to ask who she was.

That ignorance is its own kind of indictment, and not of me alone, but of how thoroughly we bury the stories of Black women who dared to be extraordinary.

Bessie Coleman did not drift quietly through history. She split the sky open. And yet for years, her name to me was nothing more than a stretch of asphalt. It was only in recent years that I finally sat down and asked the question that the highway named in her honor had been silently posing all along:

Who was this woman? The answer left me breathless.

Born in the Dust, Destined for the Clouds

Bessie Coleman entered this world in Atlanta, Texas in 1892, one of thirteen children born to sharecroppers, a detail that tells you everything about the weight she was carrying from her first breath. Poverty was not merely a circumstance of her upbringing; it was a systematic condition imposed on Black families, particularly across the American South, designed to keep ambition small and horizons narrow. And yet something in Bessie refused to be contained.

This is what Women’s History Month demands we reckon with honestly: the women who changed this world did not do so from positions of comfort or privilege. They did it despite circumstances engineered to stop them.

In 1915, Bessie relocated to Chicago to live with her brothers, part of the great northward tide of Black migration. She took work as a manicurist, saving money with the quiet determination of someone who already knew exactly what they were saving for. She had been electrified by accounts of World War I fighter pilots. She wanted that mastery. She intended to have it.

When America Said No, She Went to France

Coleman applied to American flight schools and was refused at every door. Not because she lacked aptitude or will, but because she was Black and because she was a woman. So she changed the equation entirely, applying to the Caudron Brothers’ School of Aviation in France.

She met Robert Abbott, the iconic publisher of the Chicago Defender while working at a barbershop in Chicago. Over time they became life long friends. He was the one who had advised Coleman to get her pilots license sparking her decision to study for her pilots license in France. The only issue was that Coleman did not know any French.

Ultimately Coleman learned the language. She crossed the Atlantic alone and earned her international pilot’s license in 1921, becoming not only the first Black American woman to do so, but the first woman of any race.

She returned to the United States and performed loop-the-loops and death-defying dives before crowds who had never seen anything like her. Because there had never been anything like her.

Her larger vision, as chronicled in Robert Michaeli’s The Defender, was nothing short of revolutionary. She dreamed of opening her own chain of flight schools admitting men and women, Black and white alike. That was 1921. That is not incrementalism. That is radical imagination.

What the Books Reveal: Reading Bessie Coleman Whole

📖 Queen Bess: Daredevil Aviator by Doris L. Rich

If you want to understand the full architecture of Bessie Coleman’s life, Doris L. Rich’s Queen Bess: Daredevil Aviator is where you should start. Rich faced a formidable challenge: Coleman left behind almost no paper trail. The historical record is thin in the way that records of Black women’s lives so often are. Not because those lives lacked substance, but because the institutions that preserved memory were not built with them in mind.

What Rich does instead is work from the margins inward. She reconstructs Coleman’s world through the African American newspapers of the era, the Defender chief among them, and through interviews with people who knew her: family members, friends, fellow aviators. The result is a biography that feels less like a monument and more like an excavation. You sense Rich turning over every available fragment, refusing to let the absence of documents become an excuse for absence of story.

The book honors Coleman’s dual heritage as a woman of African American and Native American descent, a complexity that deepens the portrait considerably. It also captures the specific texture of barnstorming-era aviation: the danger, the spectacle, the fragile economics of a career built on crowd-drawing stunts. Coleman’s nickname, Queen Bess, was not merely affectionate. It was earned, performance by white-knuckled performance, in open cockpits above astonished crowds.

For Women’s History Month 2026, Queen Bess is essential reading precisely because it demonstrates what it costs to recover a woman’s story from the margins of history. Rich’s painstaking methodology is itself an act of respect, a refusal to let Coleman remain a footnote when she deserves a chapter of her own.

📖 A Pair of Wings by Carole Hopson

Where Rich gives us the historian’s account, Carole Hopson’s A Pair of Wings gives us the imaginative one, and in some ways, that imagination gets closer to the bone. Hopson is an airline captain herself, and that credential matters enormously here. She is not speculating about what flight means to a woman who had to fight for it. She knows the feeling of the cockpit from the inside, and she brings that knowledge to every page.

The novel opens in the Texas cotton fields, a young Bessie watching a plane buzz low overhead, close enough, she imagines, to catch in her hands. That image of the plane within reach, the sky as something almost touchable, sets the emotional register for everything that follows. Hopson traces Coleman’s Great Migration to Chicago, her relationships with Robert Abbott and Jesse Binga, the founder of Chicago’s first Black bank, and the relentless negotiation between her public ambition and her private life.

What the novel does brilliantly is refuse to make Coleman’s story uncomplicated. The freedom she finds in the air costs her something on the ground. Her brothers struggle under the full weight of Jim Crow. A plane crash nearly kills her before her career can fully flower. A love affair with Binga forces her to confront difficult truths. Hopson renders these tensions with what the book’s own description calls tenderness and mastery, and that phrase earns its keep.

Two years ahead of Amelia Earhart, Bessie Coleman earned her pilot’s license in France. Hopson does not let that fact sit quietly. She makes you feel the full audacity of it: a Black woman from the Texas cotton fields, learning French, crossing an ocean, training with combat pilots who had survived the aerial dogfights of World War I, and returning to America as something the country had never seen before.

The Day the Sky Went Silent

On April 30, 1926, at a Jacksonville airfield, something went terribly wrong at 3,000 feet. Coleman was not wearing her harness. She was thrown from the cockpit and fell to her death. She was 34 years old. The Defender’s account is devastating in its precision: her body crushed and mangled on impact, the plane spiraling through a pine tree, the wreckage set ablaze by a carelessly dropped cigarette before rescue crews could even retrieve her copilot.

Three memorial services were held: Jacksonville, Orlando, and Chicago. At that Chicago service, Ida B. Wells, the journalist who had faced down the full terror of the American South without blinking, delivered an essay honoring Coleman’s work on racial equality. Two giants of Black history, one marking the departure of the other. I do not read that passage without feeling something close to grief. Not sentimentality. Magnitude of loss.

The Legacy She Planted in the Sky

What Bessie Coleman set in motion did not die with her. In the 1930s, the Blackbirds, a group of Black stunt pilots, flew in formation patterns that were a direct inheritance of the path she had opened. In the 1970s, a group of Black women founded the Bessie Coleman Aviators Club, carrying her name forward as both tribute and promise.

This is the particular alchemy of a life lived in defiance of resistance: it generates permission for others. Bessie Coleman did not just fly planes. She granted a kind of spiritual license to every Black girl who ever looked at the sky and wondered if it was for her too.

Women’s History Month exists, in part, to insist that we hold these stories with the weight they deserve. Not as footnotes. Not as feel-good interludes in a broader narrative written by and for someone else.

The story of Bessie Coleman is central to American aviation history, not adjacent to it. She was the first. Not the first Black woman. The first woman. That fact belongs at the front of every history of flight. Both Queen Bess and A Pair of Wings insist on that truth, from different angles, with equal conviction.

What That Highway Was Trying to Tell Me

I drove the Bessie Coleman Expressway hundreds of times and never once stopped to ask why it bore her name. We move through history every day, past the names on buildings, the streets bearing witness to lives that rewrote the possible, and we rarely pause long enough to hear what those names are saying.

Bessie Coleman was a sharecropper’s daughter who went to France to learn to fly because America would not teach her. She came back and performed loops above crowds who had never seen anything like her, because there had never been anything like her. She dreamed of schools with no color line and no gender barrier. She knelt before a plane and prayed before she climbed into the sky for the last time.

Read Doris Rich’s Queen Bess to understand the facts of that life. Read Carole Hopson’s A Pair of Wings to feel it. Between them, they give you Bessie Coleman whole: the daredevil and the dreamer, the pioneer and the woman still reaching for a freedom that kept receding just past the horizon. That is the spirit Women’s History Month calls us to honor: not the polished version of courage, but the daily, unglamorous kind. The kind that learned French in Chicago. The kind that crossed an ocean alone. The kind that, even at 3,000 feet, had not finished dreaming.

---

Here at Great Books, Great Minds, we create intimate circles, high-energy literary salons, and author conversations that spark connection and ignite transformative dialogue.

Our movement now includes 10,367 followers and 4,447 subscribers across all 50 states and 94 countries who remain thirsty for the power of a great book.

There are no Substack paywalls here. Everything remains open because the heart of this work is community, conversation, and shared discovery.

If these gatherings, essays, and exchanges enrich your life, I invite you to join us as a free subscriber or as a paid supporter. Paid support helps me offer small writer fees to contributing voices like Marc Friedman whose work deepens the conversations we hold.

Your presence matters. Your support keeps this space alive. And your generosity, even a bit of coffeehouse love for a dirty chai, helps us continue exploring together, page by page.