CLAIMING THE SKY

(Black Aviators)

by Sheila Turnage

for American Legacy Magazine, Spring 2000, pp.18-20, 22, 24, 26, 28.

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September 3, 1922. At Curtiss Field on Long Island, New York, Bessie Coleman is making history. Again. As she sits at the controls of the fragile airplane, Chicago's "Queen Bess" is already front-page news in black newspapers across America. Fifteen months ago she made headlines when she returned from France as the first African-American woman to earn an international pilot's license. Now, after a second round of training in France, she will attempt to do what no black woman has done: fly over American soil. Reporters mill among the crowd of two thousand, which moments earlier buzzed with excitement as Coleman--a small woman in a Paris-designed aviator's uniform--climbed into the borrowed Curtiss JN-4.

As the final strains of "The Star-Spangled Banner," played by an Army hand, fade away, she guides the jenny down the runway and into the sky. The loop-the-loops learned in Paris will wait; the plane's owners have forbidden stunts. Today she contents herself with flawless takeoffs and elegant sweeps. Today Bessie Coleman claims the sky.

Marion Coleman, now eighty-three years old, was just six when her famous Aunt Bessie made that first American flight. Coleman, who lived in the same Chicago apartment building as her aunt, didn't see the flight, but she knew Aunt Bessie was somebody special. "She spoiled me," Coleman chuckles. "My cousin and I would brag about her. But her achievement didn't mean much to me until I got older. We didn't realize how great she was. I know now it wasn't easy." In fact, most people said what she did was impossible.

Bessie Coleman was born in Atlanta, Texas, on January 26, 1892, the sixth surviving child of Susan and George Coleman. Marion Coleman says Bessie inherited the light complexion of her father, a Choctaw Indian. The Colemans soon moved to Waxahachie, south of Dallas, and there brought three more daughters into the world. In 1901, when George asked Susan to move with him to Oklahoma's Indian Territory, she said no. The family split up, Susan and her four young daughters staying in Waxahachie. She worked as a housekeeper there while Bessie, nine, tended to her little sisters, reading them stories, taking them to school, and leading them into the fields to pick cotton.

At eighteen, having squeezed all the knowledge she could from Waxahachie's one-room, eight-grade schoolhouse, Coleman enrolled in the Colored Agricultural and Normal University (now Langston University) in Langston, Oklahoma. Her funds exhausted after one term, she headed home. When she learned that a church in her hometown had planned a party to welcome her back, she brought the university's band along to trumpet her arrival--showing a glimmer of the spirit that would later earn her renown as America's first black aviatrix.

She despised Texas's cotton fields and went into business as a laundress. As a child she had read library books on black leaders like Harriet Tubman and Booker T. Washington. Now she read the Chicago Defender, a "race" newspaper that train porters brought south. Chicago, a mecca for black Southerners, promised opportunity. At twenty-three Coleman retired her washboard and moved north.

"I had two uncles in Chicago," Marion Coleman says. "Uncle Johnny was a cook"; his employers included Al Capone. "And my other uncle was a Pullman porter," she recalls. "You were a big shot if you were a porter on a train." They welcomed Bessie, who sized up Chicago's opportunities and became a barbershop manicurist on the Stroll, the city's black main street.

Along this eight-block stretch of State Street, black-owned businesses stood elbow-to-elbow with some of Chicago's hottest jazz clubs. The movers and shakers of black Chicago, including the Defender's publisher, Robert Abbott, and the real-estate promoter Jesse Binga, ruled the Stroll by day; Louis Armstrong, Ethel Waters, Bessie Smith, and Alberta Hunter took charge at night.

The Stroll was a good location for Coleman, says Doris Rich, author of Queen Bess: Daredevil Aviator. "She definitely needed to he noticed if she was going to get what she wanted. She didn't know yet what she wanted, but she knew how to network." Bankers, jazz singers, poets, mobsters--everyone flocked to the Stroll, and everyone wanted to look good when they got there. As a manicurist, she soon found herself holding hands with some of the most influential men in Chicago, among them Robert Abbott.

Coleman bided her time, a dreamer in search of a dream. "She sent for me and my mother and my grandmother to come here from Texas," Marion Coleman says. She also read about black heroes of the day in the Defender, following the career ofEugene Bullard, an American who flew for France during World War I (see "All Blood Runs Red," American Legacy, February/March 1995).

Her dream crystallized: She would fly. She applied to flight schools. One by one they turned her down."They would not accept her, unless she would pass for white," her niece says. Bessie refused (as she would again when a Chicago paper's offer to feature her carried the same stipulation). "She took my grandmother, who is very dark like I am, with her, and she said, 'This is my mother. I'm colored.' That was the end of it."

"I think that behind all of the ambition there was always total loyalty to race," Doris Rich adds. "It is amazing, when you consider the extent of her ambition."

Coleman turned to Robert Abbott for advice. The publisher knew a good story when he met one. "He told her she had to go to France to get her license," her niece recalls. There she would receive an equal chance in the world's best aviation schools, and news of her achievement might sell newspapers too. She bequeathed her manicurist's chair to her sister Georgia, took a job managing a chili parlor, and studied French. "She saved her money, and she had other people helping her," Marion Coleman says. "My grandma said she worked night and day."

Abbott wrote letters on her behalf and may have helped fund her quest. Even so, her wages couldn't cover rent, French lessons, travel cost, and tuition. "1 think she was Binga's mistress," Rich says, referring to Jesse Binga, the former Pullman porter who had made his fortune in real estate. As a "blockbuster," Binga would buy one house in a white Chicago neighborhood, sell it to a black family, and scoop up the rest of the block as panicked white owners sold at bargain rates. By 1925 Binga would own his own bank on the Stroll. For now, Rich says, he helped finance Bessie's dream.

Championed by the Defender, Coleman sailed to France in November 1920. On June 15, 1921, after seven months' study at the École d'Aviation des Frères Caudron, she became the first African-American woman to earn an international pilot's license. She beat Amelia Earhart to the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale's prestigious license by six months.

In Paris she bought the uniform that would grace newspapers across America: a crisply tailored, military-style outfit with epaulets, a long leather coat, lace-up knee-high boots, a wide officer's belt, and the obligatory leather helmet with goggles. Flying was still purely entertainment in America, and Coleman costumed herself in high style. But, as she toured Europe, where World War I had filled the sky with airplanes, she glimpsed what aviation would become.

When she came home she told a Defender reporter: "I thought it my duty to risk my life to learn aviation and to encourage flying among men and women of our race who are so far behind the white race in this modern study. I made up my mind to try." Having achieved the first part of her goal, she announced that she would open a school for black pilots. "She really did see a future in aviation," Rich says. "She knew it was going to be more than stunt flying, and she wanted her people in on the ground floor."

In 1922, when she returned from a second course of flight instruction in Europe, reporters sought her out. "The only other woman who handled the press that well was Earhart," Rich says. "Both women charmed the reporters at every meeting. They always gave them a story." Coleman's stories often included a hefty dose of hope. She claimed to have ordered a fleet of airplanes from Europe for her planned school, and she whittled a few years off her age. In Chicago, she even recruited her sister Georgia as a parachutist, promising that she would be allowed to perform in a "Drop of Death" during the elder sister's show. "My mother told her no, no, not her," Marion Coleman laughs, recalling the night Bessie brought Georgia's costume home. "My grandmother told me all about it. She'd always kid about Aunt Bessie," she adds. "She'd say, 'I had thirteen kids, raised nine, and one's crazy.'"

In the air, Queen Bess delivered. She dazzled two thousand onlookers at Chicago's Checkerboard Airdrome (now Midway Airport) on October 15, 1922, flying a plane borrowed from the airfield's white owner. The Defender's reporter, J. Blame Poindexter, wrote that the spectators "witnessed some of the most marvelous flying feats that have ever been performed by the most daring aviators," including a heart-stopping figure eight.

"She constantly reminded people that they could do whatever white folks did, and her example was flying," Rich says. "That was considered the ultimate accomplishment at the time, the combination of skill and courage. She was telling them, 'You can do it."'

As Coleman's popularity soared, her stock with various business managers, who saw her as little more than a showgirl, nose-dived. In late 1922, after refusing to fly segregated venues, she walked out on her one and only movie deal, claiming the film cast her as an "Uncle Tom." And, perhaps because of poor communications , she missed several shows. She was acquiring a reputation for being temperamental--a tag her enemies promoted.

In 1923 Coleman landed a job publicizing the Coast Tire and Rubber Company of Oakland, California, and soon began appearing in the company's newspaper ads. She started her life over in California, where she bought her first plane, a surplus Jenny, for $400. Things began looking up. But on February 4 she departed from Santa Monica, heading for a nearby fairgrounds where ten thousand fans waited to see her fly. Just after takeoff, her new plane stalled and plummeted three hundred feet to the ground. Regaining consciousness, she begged a doctor to patch her up on the spot so she could keep flying. Checking her broken leg, three broken ribs, and facial cuts, he rushed her to the hospital instead.

Back in Chicago, one of her sisters heard the news. "Elois turned to her mother and said, 'Well, I guess that finishes it,'" Rich recounts. "And her mother said, 'Oh, you don't know Bess."' The patient issued a statement from the hospital: "Tell them all that as soon as I can walk I'm going to fly! And my faith in aviation and [its] usefulness . . . in fulfilling the destiny of my people isn't shaken at all."

After nearly two years' respite, Coleman, at thirty-three, agreed to a series of air shows in the South. Once again she turned to the press, charming gullible reporters as she cheerfully adjusted reality to her advantage, promoting her dreams as facts and amplifying the credentials that would help her realize her aspirations. She had always shaved a few years from her age; now she axed an entire decade, and with good reason. In an era when forty was old, fans who cheered a twenty-three-year-old aviatrix as a bold adventurer might consider a thirty-three-year-old fly-girl an eccentric has-been. So in Texas she took on the persona of a twenty-three-year-old college graduate, impressing the segregated audiences with her flying and captivating them with a new tactic: lectures directed toward women.

Rich explains that "African-American men at the time very much resented a woman of their own race doing what they were not allowed to do." Women were a more receptive audience. It was women, Bessie now believed, who would help her launch the next generation into the sky.

Although she charged adults admission for her popular lectures, which included footage of her flying over the Kaiser's palace in Germany, she spoke for free at schools, inspiring children with her courage and that snappy uniform. She hit her stride. In Dallas she made a down payment on yet another bargain-basement Jenny. She contacted a Florida filmmaker, suggesting that a movie on her life be made, starring--who else?--herself. "I am, and know it, the most known colored person other than the Jazz singers," she wrote. She was right.

In Orlando, Coleman met Edwin M. Beeman, heir to a chewing gum fortune. With his help she bought her plane, promising friends who worried for her safety that she would fly only one more stunt exhibition. "She was in a town where there was money, where there was black money," Rich says. "She figured if she gave enough lectures, she could raise the funds for her school."

She spoke in churches and theaters while a white mechanic, William D. Wills, took off from Dallas to test her new Jenny. As she chatted with schoolchildren, Wills sputtered east in her plane, halting often for repairs.

He landed in Jacksonville, Florida, on April 28, 1926. The next day, Coleman ran into Robert Abbott, who urged her not to fly with Wills, saying he felt uneasy about the mechanic. But she had planned a parachute jump and needed someone to pilot the plane while she scouted a drop site. "The airplanes she was flying, they were just old things, thrown away," Marion Coleman says. "They weren't worth a darn." Rich agrees: "I remember one old guy saying, 'You should have heard her plane. It was supposed to be 90 horsepower; it was working on about 60 when I heard it."'

On April 30 Wills readied the aircraft. As he flew, Coleman, usually a stickler for safety, let her seat belt dangle as she peered over the side. "She was leaning out of the cockpit to see where she was going to jump," Rich explains. At 3,500 feet, the plane lunged forward and dove, spinning out of control. She struggled to hang on. At 500 feet it flipped, and she tumbled out. An instant later, she was dead.

Wills was killed as the plane crashed in a nearby field, where a shaky bystander lit a cigarette, igniting the wreck and charring Wills's body. Investigators found that a loose wrench had jammed the control gears, causing the fatal accident, but rumors of sabotage rose from the wreck's ashes.

A note from a schoolgirl, written the day before, was found in Coleman's uniform pocket: "Mrs. Coleman, My Dear One: I am writing you to congratulate you on your brave doings. I want to be an aviatrix when I get [to be] a woman. I like to see our own Race do brave things. I am going to be out there to see you jump from the airplane. I want an airplane of my own when I get [to bel a woman. Many kisses. Yours, a little girl, Ruby Mae McDuffie."

In Jacksonville and Chicago thousands of mourners filed past her coffin over the next few days. Bessie Coleman, who had longed to embrace the sky, was lowered into the earth's waiting arms on May 5, 1926.

The dreamer was dead, but the dream the continent, didn't die. "It changed focus," says Philip S. Hart, a sociologist and filmmaker whose great-uncle, James Herman Banning, became the first black pilot to earn a U.S. license, in 1926. Within a few years of her death, two black flying clubs were born. "She inspired the formation of them," Hart says.

William Powell, a pilot who had followed her career since Chicago, founded the Bessie Coleman Aero Club in Los Angeles in 1929. The association not only trained adult pilots but also continued her work with children. "That's something that he picked up from her," says Hart, who has produced a documentary on early black aviators and written two children's books on the subject.

The Bessie Coleman Aero Club also had a larger impact, he says. As an aviation school, "it clearly showed the world that this segment of the population was interested in learning to fly, just like the mainstream population, and had the resources to organize flight clubs and air shows, to purchase and maintain the airplanes, and to actively participate in a new, growing industry." In 1938 two black pilots, Willa Brown and Cornelius Coffey, founders of the National Airmen's Association of America, opened the Coffey School of Aeronautics, in Chicago. Over the next seven years they trained some two hundred African-American pilots. Graduates of that school, in turn, taught at Tuskegee, Alabama, training the U.S. military's first black pilots during World War II.

Willa Brown, who credited Bessie Coleman as an early influence, became one of the first black women to receive a commercial pilot's license in the United States. A strong advocate for African-American and women pilots throughout her life, Brown was named to the Federal Aviation Administration's Women's Advisory Committee in 1972. "People like Bessie Coleman saw that this was going to be an industry of the future, a new technology," Hart says. "The early black pilot fliers, Bessie Coleman included, were visionaries."

Beverley D. Sharp, the first African-American president of the Ninety-Nines, Inc., an international group of women pilots named for their 99 charter members, agrees. "She was absolutely a visionary," she says. "Her ambition was to give people a livelihood, when they still thought flying was just a novelty."

What would Coleman think of the progress African-Americans have made in fulfilling her vision? Both Hart and Sharp say that, overall, she would be disappointed. The FAA doesn't compile statistics on race, but according to the Organization of Black Airline Pilots, Inc., of the 71,000 commercial pilots flying in the United States today, only about 700--less than 1 percent--are black. The number of African-American women pilots, both commercial and military, is even lower, partly because women could not train as Air Force pilots until 1976. Based on the Ninety-Nines's membership, she estimates that fewer than 1 percent of the 35,531 women pilots flying today are African-American. "There's precious few of us," she says.

Bessie made a brave beginning, Marion Coleman says: "She was somebody who really knew what she was going into, and she didn't let anything stop her. She accomplished a lot. Not as much as she might have, but she was the first."

Beverley Sharp adds, "We've knocked down most of the barriers. The airplane doesn't know what color I am, doesn't know what sex I am. I have a vision of a world where every young girl knows she can fly. I believe we can achieve that in my lifetime. I believe if we put our minds to it, we can do it. I'm using my position as the president of the Ninety-Nines to spread that gospel. People like Bessie Coleman, who had a dream and pushed it and pushed it and pushed it, encourage me to keep on going with my own dream. . . . I feel like her spirit's still out there, saying, 'Go for it."' *

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see http://www.blackwings.com/

The Ninety-Nines, Inc., Box 965, 7100 Terminal Drive, Oklahoma City, OK 73159-0965 (800-994-1929), an organization of licensed women pilots from thirty-five countries, has extensive archival records on women pilots around the world. The group recently opened a museum of women pilots in Oklahoma City. For more visit http://www.ninety/

Books to Read

The best recent biography is Queen Bess: Daredevil Aviator, Doris L. Rich, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995.

Other books about African-American aviators include: African-American Aviators: Bessie Coleman, William J. Powell, James Herman Banning, Benjamin 0. Davis, Jr., General Daniel James, Jr., by Stanley P. Jones and L. Octavia Tripp, Capstone Press, 1998.

Invisible Wings: An Annotated Bibliography on Blacks Aviation, 1916--1993, compiled by Betty Kaplan Gubert, Greenwood Press, 1994. It is the only reference book exclusively on African-Americans in aviation and has more than 1,600 entries.

Black Wings: The American Black in Aviation, by Von Hardesty and Dominick Pisano, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998. An outgrowth of the exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum, this book calls attention to the historic roles blacks have played in shaping the growth of modern aviation.

Soaring Above Setbacks: The Autobiography of Janet Harmon Bragg, as told to Marjorie M. Kriz, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996. An account by the first African-American woman to earn a full commercial pilot's license.