Wonder Woman of the Week: Bessie Coleman

Sometimes, the most famous heroes of history are the ones who died in pursuit of doing the impossible. Bessie Coleman- a woman born into Native-American and African-American heritage- would go on to be one of the earliest women to earn a pilot's license in world history and challenged preconceived notions of race, ethnicity, and gender and their roles in her contemporary society.

After the wake of the US Civil War, former slaves who remained in the Deep South found themselves under a nearly identical system of oppression under new "Jim Crow" Laws that isolated impoverished African-Americans to agricultural plots where they worked for low wages for tyrannical land-owning whites. Bessie Coleman was born into a family of these sharecroppers. Her father- mostly Cherokee- and her mother- mostly African-American- would go on to have thirteen children, with Bessie as number ten. Eventually, Bessie's father left the family and headed to Oklahoma.

At the age of twelve, Bessie earned a scholarship to a missionary school in Oklahoma where she studied tediously to earn her acceptance letter to the Oklahoma Colored Agricultural and Normal University (now Langston University). After a year at school, Bessie ran out of money for college and moved to Chicago. While working for pocket change, Bessie began hearing stories of World War I pilots and she knew she wanted to learn more. But only white men were permitted entrance into flight school in the United States at the time, so Coleman raised money for pilot school in France. When she raised up enough money, she cross the ocean to Europe and began pilot school.

After earning her pilot's license, Coleman returned to the United States as the first African-American, first Native American, and first woman to receive a pilot's license. Her home nation heralded her home as a heroine of the sky, allowing the new pilot to capitalize on her education. She traveled the country performing aerial stunts for awe-inspired crowds and began designing her own aircraft. Unfortunately at 34 years old, Bessie died in a plane crash. While testing a new plane, Coleman and her agent both died when a wench stalled the engine and forced the plane into a nosedive. Coleman- who had not yet even fascened her seatbelt- fell out of the plane and died from the fall. Her agent- still in the plane- died on impact.

But in her death, Bessie Coleman managed to expand her inspiration. Soon after her death, the first flight school for African-Americans opened; Amelia Earhart (another Wonder Woman of the Week) soon earned her own pilot's license; and when Doctor Mae Jemison (the first African-American woman in space, another Wonder Woman of the Week, and the titular author of our title quote on this website) first entered outer space, she did so carrying a photograph of this week's spotlight.