LA: Amelia’s story is such a thing of myth, but what sort of celebrity was she when she was kind of at the peak of her fame before she went missing?
DC: Amelia was seen as a great promoter of aviation, as a record setter and as an extraordinary woman, and she made a concerted effort to build upon her records, always trying to do something new and different that would not only give her experience, but would also land her in the headlines in the news. Bessie was not known. She was not covered by any white newspapers as a rule, and she just really wasn’t known. Bessie never got the chance to prove herself, whereas Amelia did.
LA: I am familiar with Bessie, but it’s only through sort of years of working at Traveler and being curious about this sort of corner of women’s history, and she doesn’t get talked about in the same context as Amelia, but yet you say they’re peers, but met such different challenges.
DC: Well, for Bessie Coleman, it’s all about discrimination. In the early 19 teens, discrimination, segregation were legal at the time, certainly in the United States, and there was no opportunity for African Americans to learn to fly. Simply no instructors would teach them, and they did not have the means to go out and buy airplanes and learn on their own.
LA: Tell me a little bit more about her background, because she’s the first African American woman to hold a pilot’s license. She also identified as Native American, correct?
DC: Yes. Her father had Native American relatives, and then her mother was African American, so she did become both the first African American and Indigenous American pilot. She was born in Texas, worked in the cotton fields, the whole family eventually, except for her father, her father went off to Oklahoma, back to his indigenous family. The rest of the family eventually participated in the great migration of Southerners up north and ended up in Chicago, and she got a job as a manicurist, which was something that was done in the black community at that time, but she was unsettled and wanted to do more, and so selecting the idea of becoming a pilot was truly extraordinary, daunting and seemingly impossible.
She worked within her Black community, and so she did have support there. One of the big supporters was the African-American newspaper, the Defender in Chicago, the editor of Mr. Abbott. He saw it as an opportunity basically to highlight an African American who was pursuing something different. So it was promotional for him, but it worked to Bessie’s advantage as well, because he helped her with ideas and support to get that license and to get started
LA: Coming up: how Bessie Coleman had to go to France to get her pilot’s license. One barrier was broken, but there were many more to overcome.
DC: She had to go to France because no Americans, no white Americans would teach African Americans how to fly at that time, and especially an African American woman. So she took French while she was in Chicago, she saved money. She was able to get money from family and friends, and she went to France, and there she was enrolled in the Caudron School of Aviation, which was one of the premier schools of the time in France. Took her seven months, but she did learn to fly there and received her license becoming the first African American to receive a license from the International Group Fédération Aéronautique International, which was then recognized as an international license that would allow her to fly anywhere in the world. That was important because she could bring that back to the United States and she could fly back in the United States. She came home, she went back to Europe again to get more training, flew in the Netherlands and also in Germany.
