HiSET Practice Test 10

Queen Bess

¹In 1915, a young woman from Texas stepped off a train in Chicago with little money and less certainty about what she would do there. Bessie Coleman was twenty-three. She had grown up in Waxahachie, Texas, one of many children in a family that picked cotton for a living, and she had walked miles each day to a one-room school for Black children. She did well in school, especially in arithmetic, and she had saved enough for a single term of college in Oklahoma before the money ran out.

²In Chicago she trained as a manicurist and worked in a barbershop on the city's South Side. It was there, according to the story she later told, that she listened to soldiers returning from World War I describe the airplanes they had seen in France. One of her brothers teased her that French women flew planes, something he was sure she would never do. Coleman decided he was wrong.

³Deciding was the easy part. No flight school in the United States would accept her. She was Black, and she was a woman, and either fact alone was enough to close doors. Robert Abbott, the publisher of the Chicago Defender, a widely read Black newspaper, suggested another route: France, where she might be judged on her ability. Coleman took French classes at night, saved her earnings, and found backers willing to help with the rest. In 1920 she sailed for Europe.

⁴The training was demanding. Students flew fragile biplanes made of wood and fabric, and Coleman later recalled seeing a fellow student killed in a crash. She kept flying. In June 1921, she earned an international pilot's license, becoming the first African American woman to hold one. When she returned to the United States that fall, reporters met her ship.

⁵A license, however, did not pay the bills. Commercial flying was still new, and the most reliable way for a pilot to earn a living was to perform at air shows. Coleman went back to Europe for advanced training in stunt flying and then began touring, thrilling crowds with figure eights, loops, and steep dives. Newspapers called her "Queen Bess." She used her fame deliberately. She spoke at schools and churches about the opportunities aviation could offer, and she refused to perform at events that would not admit Black spectators.

⁶Her larger goal was a flight school where young Black Americans could learn to fly without having to cross an ocean to do it. She never opened it. In 1926, during a practice flight before an air show in Florida, her plane went into a sudden dive, and she was killed. She was thirty-four.

⁷Yet the school she imagined came into being in other forms. Within a few years, Black aviators in Los Angeles had founded a flying club in her name, and for decades pilots flew over her grave in Chicago each year to drop flowers. In 1995, the United States Postal Service issued a stamp bearing her face. The young woman whom every American flight school had turned away had become a part of the history of flight itself.