From cotton to clouds: The Epiphany of Ms. Bessie Coleman

She went from the drudgery of working in fields filled with white fluffy clouds of cotton to the thrilling, exhilarating work of an airshow pilot in the white, fluffy clouds of the sky.

Known as "Queen Bessie," she was born Elizabeth Coleman in 1892  in Atlanta, Texas, the tenth of 13 children of George Coleman, an African American who may have had Cherokee or Choctaw grandparents, and Susan Coleman, who was African American. The Coleman family were sharecroppers. Ms. Bessie worked as a child in the cotton fields, vowing to one day to "amount to something."

At the age of six, Ms. Bessie began attending school in Waxahachie, Texas in a one-room, segregated schoolhouse where she completed all eight grades. At age 12, Ms. Bessie was accepted into the Missionary Baptist Church School on a scholarship. Yearning to further her education she worked and saved her money and enrolled at Langston University in Oklahoma where she completed one term before running out of funds and returning home to Texas.

Climbing the ladder of success always begins with stepping on the first rung. Often, it means keeping one hand on the rung in front of you while raising the other to take the hand of one who has gone before you.

In 1915 at age 23, Ms. Bessie moved to Chicago to live with her older brother where she became a beautician and a manicurist in a south side barbershop. One of her customers was a man named Robert Abbott, the publisher of the Chicago Defender who told her stories of the pilots returning home to America at the end of World War I.

Something in the stories captured her imagination and the young woman who had spent her life as a girl in the cotton fields of Texas decided that she would like to fly.

She took a second job in order to save money quickly so that she could pursue her dream to be a pilot, but at that time American flight schools did not admit either blacks or women. Robert Abbott encouraged Ms. Bessie to study flying abroad and later she received financial backing from a banker, Jesse Binga, and the Chicago Defender.

One day Ms. Bessie’s brother John, who had served in France during the war said, “I know something that French women do that you’ll never do…fly!” That remark prompted her to travel to France, after teaching herself to speak French.

On June 15, 1921, at the age of 29 and fifty-eight years after the Emancipation Proclamation, Ms. Elizabeth Coleman graduated the Federation Aeronautique Internationale becoming the first African American woman to achieve a pilot’s license.

Still, Ms. Bessie continued to dream. She remembered her first step on the ladder of success and that her brother's hand had been there to help her up. Her dream was to establish a flying school for African Americans in the United States. She knew it was a risky dream, filled with challenges and obstacles, but she was willing to work hard to achieve her goal.

She began her career as a "barnstorming" pilot, performing riveting demonstrations of aerobatics including loops, figure eights, and near-ground dips. This earned her the affectionate nickname of 'Queen Bess" and "Brave Bessie".

She didn't mind. Whatever brought in the crowds, and with them, the money she needed to make the freedom of the skies available to everyone.

"The air is the only place free from prejudice, " she said, and throughout her career, she would only perform at air exhibitions if the crowd was desegregated and permitted to enter through the same gates.

Tragically, although she saved her money and came close to her goal of opening a flight school for Blacks in the United States, Bessie Coleman was tragically killed on April 30, 1926. 

During a rehearsal for an aerial show, the airplane she was in unexpectedly went into a dive and then a spin, subsequently throwing her from the airplane at 2,000 feet. She was not wearing her seat belt because she was of small stature and needed to lift herself up so she could see over the side of the plane.

She died instantly. Upon examination of the aircraft, it was later discovered that a wrench used to maintain the engine had jammed the controls of the airplane.

Ms. Bessie was 34 years old.

Funeral services were held in Florida, before her body was sent back to Chicago. While there was little mention in most media, news of her death was widely carried in the African-American press. Ten thousand mourners attended her ceremonies in Chicago, which were led by activist Ida B. Wells.

Despite this tragic fate, Ms. Elizabeth Coleman's legacy of flight endures and she is credited with inspiring generations of African-American aviators, male and female, including the Tuskegee Airmen and NASA astronaut, Dr. Mae Jemison, who carried Bessie Coleman’s picture with her on her first mission in the Space Shuttle when she became the first African American woman in space aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavor in September 1992.

I hope something good happens to you today.

Bom dia.