Look Up Waaay Up Today it’s no big deal to see an airplane in the sky But that wasn’t always the case When the Wright brothers landed their first plane more than 100 years ago in 1903 many saw it as the birth of human flight For years afterward few people had the chance to ride in a plane let alone fly one And certainly very few women had those opportunities But as always there were some fierce women pioneers who earned their pilot’s license and took to the skies As people set their sights even higher from the sky to outer space smart capable women put up their hands to say Save that seat for me They journeyed to space stations conducting experiments and uncovering the secrets of the universe And so we take a look at women who might have gazed up at the sky and wondered What the heck is it like up there
I refused to take for an answer NO BESSIE COLEMAN 1892 1926 United States The world didn’t really want Bessie Coleman to succeed Born in Texas in 1892 she lived in a time and place where it was uncommon for Black and Native American women like her to hold positions of power In fact as the child of farm workers Bessie was often told that her only career option was to be a domestic worker But she had other ideas Bessie wanted to be a pilot TO THE SKIES After being rejected by every flight school in the country because she was both a person of color and a woman Bessie taught herself to speak French so she could earn her pilot’s license in France In 1921 two years before Amelia Earhart got her license she became the world’s first Black aviatrix Since commercial flights weren’t a thing yet Bessie became a trick pilot to make a living She performed aerial stunts for crowds at air shows loop-the-looping at state fairs to many cries of Holy cow and Would ya look at that to page the Turn about more read Earhart Amelia
Bessie insisted that all her shows be desegregated meaning white and Black people would use the same entrance and sit together This was a big deal back then especially in the southern United States where there were many laws that treated Black people like second-class citizens But show organizers knew Bessie could pack in the crowds so they did what she asked Tricks of a Trick Pilot BARREL ROLL Rolling the plane sideways while flying forward to corkscrew through the air Don’t try it after lunch LOOP THE LOOP Pointing the nose of the plane up and back to make a giant circle in the sky Hold on to your sunglasses DIVE Nose-diving the plane toward the ground at an extreme angle and then pulling up at the last minute Only for those with nerves of steel SOARING IN SOLIDARITY Bessie was a brilliant self-promoter and believed that the way she lived her life set an example of the greatness Black people could achieve Sometimes she took other Black women up in her plane women who like her had been told they would never amount to much Bessie wanted them to experience something very few had at the time the glory and magic of human flight Her next dream was to open a flight school for Black people But tragically at 34 years old she was killed in a plane crash before she could make that happen A few years later the Bessie Coleman Aero Club was founded in Los Angeles to make aviation accessible to the Black community Every year on the anniversary of Bessie’s death Black pilots honor her by air-dropping flowers onto her grave
