Bessie Coleman Soars Above Every Barrier

The cotton fields of Waxahachie, Texas, stretched flat and wide under a burning summer sun. Bessie Coleman picked bolls from dawn to dusk, her fingers quick and sure. But every time a bird wheeled across that enormous blue sky, she stopped and watched. Something pulled at her heart like a string tied to the clouds. Bessie was the tenth of thirteen children. Money was scarce. School was only for part of the year, when the fields didn't need tending. But Bessie read every book she could find, and she walked miles to return them so she could borrow more. Her mother always said, "Bessie, your mind is your wings. Nobody can take those." When Bessie grew up, she moved to Chicago and worked in a barbershop, pressing shirts and chatting with customers. She heard soldiers talk about the pilots they had seen in the Great War — men who looped through clouds and dove like falcons. Her eyes went wide. She knew, the way you know something deep in your bones, that she was meant to fly. She walked into flight school after flight school. Every door closed in her face. Some schools turned her away because she was a woman. Some turned her away because she was Black. Some turned her away for both reasons at once. Bessie Coleman did not cry on the steps of those schools. She lifted her chin and made a new plan. She would go to France, where the doors might be different. She saved every penny. She studied French at night after long days of work. In 1920, she boarded a ship and crossed the Atlantic Ocean alone. In France she enrolled in the best aviation school in the world. She learned to coax a rumbling biplane off the ground and nose it toward the sky. She learned to read the wind, to bank a turn so smooth it felt like dancing. On June 15, 1921, Bessie Coleman climbed out of a cockpit in France and held up a small card. It was her pilot's license — the first ever issued to a Black woman anywhere on earth. She pressed it to her chest and looked up at the sky she had always loved. "Thank you," she whispered. She came home to America and the crowds went wild. Newspapers called her "Queen Bess." Children pressed their faces to the fences of air shows to watch her dive and spin overhead. She flew figure eights. She stunted so close to the ground that the audience gasped, then cheered. But Bessie wanted more than applause. She wanted to open a flight school — a school where young Black men and women could learn to fly, where no door would be closed to anyone. She barnstormed from city to city, charging admission and saving her earnings, one air show at a time. She refused to perform anywhere that kept Black and white audience members in separate entrances. If the gates weren't equal, Bessie's plane stayed on the ground. Promoters grumbled. Bessie stood firm. Slowly, some of those fences came down. Her dream of a school was still unfinished when she died too young in a plane accident in 1926. The whole community mourned. Ten thousand people came to honor her in Chicago. But her dream did not die with her. Pilots she had inspired trained others, and those pilots trained more. A young man named William Powell started an aviation club in her name. The Tuskegee Airmen who flew with such bravery in World War II walked a sky that Bessie Coleman had helped open. Tonight, when you look out your window at the stars, remember Bessie. Remember a girl in a Texas cotton field who watched the birds and refused to believe the sky had a ceiling. She proved that courage, and a little French, can take you anywhere. Sweet dreams, little flyer. The sky is wide, and it belongs to you.