On October 1, 1921, Bessie Coleman received her international pilot's license from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale in France — the first Black woman in the world, and the first Native American woman, to earn a pilot's license of any kind. She had learned to fly in France because no American flight school would accept her.

Coleman was born in 1892 in Atlanta, Texas, the tenth of thirteen children of sharecroppers. Her father, of mixed Cherokee and African American descent, left the family when she was young. She picked cotton, did laundry, and attended a one-room segregated school. She moved to Chicago at eighteen, studied manicuring, and worked in a barbershop on the South Side. Robert Abbott, the publisher of the Chicago Defender, suggested she learn to fly. Every American flight school she applied to rejected her on the grounds of race or sex or both.

She taught herself French and applied to the École d'Aviation des Frères Caudron in Normandy. They accepted her. She earned her license in seven months.

She returned to the United States as a barnstorming pilot and aerobatic performer — the only way a Black woman could make a living in aviation in the 1920s. She refused to perform at any show that required segregated seating or barred Black spectators. She was working to save money to open a flight school for Black Americans when her aircraft malfunctioned at an airshow in Jacksonville, Florida, on April 30, 1926. She was thrown from the plane at two thousand feet and died on impact. She was thirty-four.

The flight school never opened.