The Black Amelia Earhart

Trigger

January 26 was Bessie Coleman’s 122th birthday. The picture on her aviation license portrays a good looking black woman with daring can do attitude.

Some Notes On A Very Unusual Woman

Why is this woman so much less known than Amelia Earhart?

Long before Josephine Baker, she traveled to Paris to become an aviator. She also got to know Mr. Anthony Fokker in the Netherlands.

She certainly had to overcome many more hurdles than Amelia Earhart to become an accomplished aviator. Her upbringing was very humble (“tenth of thirteen children to sharecroppers”).  She was never married to someone like George P. Putnam.

“Coleman became not only the first African-American woman to earn an international aviation license from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, and the first American of any gender or ethnicity to do so, but the first African-American woman to earn an aviation pilot's license.”

She obtained her international aviation license about two years earlier than Amelia Earhart (“June 15, 1921”).

Several man helped her more or less in her career as an aviator: “No black U.S. aviator would train her either. Robert S. Abbott, founder and publisher of the Chicago Defender, encouraged her to study abroad. Coleman received financial backing from a banker named Jesse Binga and the Defender.” Jesse Binga was a black, very successful banker, a story by itself for another time.

She became a barnstorming stunt flier on air shows.

She died too young at age 34 in 1926.

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