Passage / Scenario

Bessie Coleman, the first civilian licensed black pilot in the world, was born in 1892 to sharecroppers in Texas, where she attended a segregated school and worked with her family in the cotton fields. She dreamed of becoming a pilot but no flight school in America would accept her, so she moved to France to earn her pilot's license. When she returned to the U.S, she wanted to open a flight school for Black students. She became a stunt flier and performance for paying audiences, which she insisted be desegregated. Following her death in a plane crash in 1926, the Bessie Coleman Aero Club was established in Los Angeles in 1929. She was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 2006