The first African American woman to obtain a pilot’s license was an American aviator named Bessie Coleman. She was born on January 26, 1892, to sharecropper parents in Atlanta, Texas. Coleman, who was the tenth of thirteen kids, was raised in squalor.
Stories of World War I pilots piqued Coleman’s interest in flight, and she soon grew passionate about becoming a pilot. Nevertheless, no flying schools in the country would take female students, and the majority of them did not allow Black Americans. Coleman was determined to follow her ambition, so she worked as a manicurist to raise money before moving to France and enrolling at the Caudron Brothers’ School of Aviation.
Coleman returned to the United States in 1921 after receiving her pilot’s license, and she quickly rose to fame in the aviation industry. She earned the nicknames “Queen Bess” and “Brave Bessie” for her airshow dangerous flying acrobatics. She pushed against racial segregation in aviation and utilized her position to encourage other Black Americans and women to follow their aspirations.
At the age of 34, Coleman, unfortunately, passed away while getting ready for an air show in Jacksonville, Florida. She was a traveler on a malfunctioning aircraft that crashed. Many generations of African American and female pilots have been inspired by Coleman’s legacy. People all across the world are still motivated by her tenacity and bravery in the face of hardship to follow their goals and smash through boundaries.
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Bessie Coleman Quotes
- A dream is just a dream, but a goal is a dream with a plan and a deadline.
- If you want to achieve something, you have to work for it.
- You can’t separate a person’s ethnicity from their desire to succeed.
- You’ve never lived till you’ve flown!
- The air is the only place free from prejudice.
- There is no limit to what we, as women, can accomplish.
- If I can create the minimum of my plans and desires, there shall be no regrets.
- I decided blacks should not have to experience the difficulties I had faced, so I decided to open a flying school and teach other black women to fly.
- If I can create the maximum of my plans and wishes, there shall be no regrets.
- I made my mind up to try. I tried and was successful.
- I don’t know who invented high heels, but all women owe him a lot.
- A woman is like a teabag — you can’t tell how strong she is until you put her in hot water.
- I knew the Race needed to be represented along this most important line, so I thought it my duty to risk my life to learn aviation.
- As usual, there is a great woman behind every idiot.
- Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.
- Life can only be understood backward but it must be lived forwards.
- Fulfilling Her dream sparked a revolution and led the way for new generations of dreamers and future aviation legends.
- I never let prejudice stop me from doing what I wanted to do.
