Americans who've made significant contributions to our country have always come wrapped in different packages. Look closely, and you will sometimes even be surprised at who did what. February, since it's Black History Month, especially provides a wealth of inspiring stories about people who've been integral, often facing enormous adversity, to ensure the equality for all that is the aspiration at the heart of what our country was founded on.
Being a woman, I've always found people like Sojourner Truth and Ida B. Wells to be really interesting and important in activism and leadership, as well as plain womanliness. While it's recent, it may also be of future note to mention the other woman in this past memorable election, Cynthia McKinney (Presidential candidate for the Green Party).
There are others, though, who sort of fascinate me, like Gwendolyn Brooks, a female poet who became the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize (1950), that would fall into the category of important women in African American history. In both lesser-known but still significant contributions and in having first' bragging rights, their stories are pretty cool.
One of my all-time faves is pilot Bessie Coleman (January 26, 1892 - April 30, 1926). A Texas native, she was tenth in the line-up of thirteen. Her parents were share-croppers, but early on, dad took off. As she grew, she helped her mom take care of her younger sibs and excelled in math through all of her available eight years of education.
She briefly attended the Colored Agricultural and Normal University in Langston, Oklahoma in 1910, but left after one term due to lack of funds. At home the bleakness of her future probably started to set in, but rather than give in to it, she took a chance and moved to Chicago, where two of her brothers let her live with them while she tried to find a job and figure out what to do.
Happenstance or design, here is where the tide starts to turn. In Chicago, working as a barber shop manicurist, she hears all these pilots talking about the war and how, in France, women were already becoming pilots. Being both black and a women, there was no chance of her getting into any American flight schools. Thwarted again.
However, at the barber shop, she meets and hangs around with the likes of Robert S. Abbott, founder and publisher of the Chicago Defender. (Talk about being in the right place at the right time!) So, she helps him promote the paper, he advises her and encourages her to go for her dreams - and she DOES it!
She took a French class at the local Berlitz, (the Berlitz method being a sort-of predecessor to the Direct Method), and then moved to France (!) in 1919 to study aviation at the Caudron Brothers' School of Aviation in Le Crotoy, France. On June 15, 1921, Coleman received an international aviation license from the Federation Aeronautique Internationale, becoming the first American of ANY gender or race to hold an international pilot's license, as well as the first African American woman in the whole world to become a licensed aviation pilot!
Of course, when she came back to America people weren't exactly flying TWA. Like Amelia Earhart and other pilots at the time, she would have to work flying exhibitions. She flew performing stunts and general daredevilry for paying audiences, and hoped for endorsements and sponsorships. (It's worthy to note that amongst all this, she had to go back to France to hone and specialize her skills, meeting with everyone from top skilled instructors to aircraft designers.)
In America, Queen Bess (as she would come to be known) became a media sensation, and her skills afforded her a small power - she would not fly for segregated audiences. If people wanted to be dazzled by her thrilling figure eights, barrel-rolls, and loop-de-loops, they would have to stand shoulder to shoulder in equality, at least for the duration of the show.
Like most successful people her goals kept evolving, and although she made progress she didn't live long enough to see her ultimate dream of establishing an aviation school for other black pilots come to fruition.
In Jacksonville, FL, she was passenger on a preliminary flight with her mechanic/publicist piloting. She was checking the landscape of the area she would be landing via parachute at the next days scheduled show when the plane went down, ending her illustrious career and life.
Bessie Coleman lived her life believing in true freedom. Freeing first herself to live her most spectacular dreams enabled her to help free others from racial and gender stereotypes. Through it all, she became a pioneer in aviation as well as a pioneer in gender and racial equality.
* Other notable women of science and color:
- Sarah E. Goode was the first African American women to receive a patent (US #322,177), which was issued on July 14, 1885 for inventing The Cabinet Bed.
- Mary Eliza Mahoney enrolled in the New England Hospital Nursing School on March 26th. She became the first professionally trained African American nurse in the U.S. , 1878
- Madame C. J. Walker was a St. Louis washerwoman-turned-entrepreneur. Walker patented a method to soften and smooth African-American hair, 1905 (died a millionaire & philanthropist)
- Henrietta Bradbury patents a Torpedo Discharge Means (Underwater Cannon) , 1943, and a Bed Rack, 1945
- Bessie Blount patents a Device to help the disabled eat, 1951
- Betsy Ancker Johnson patents Signal Generators, 1966
- Renee Powell becomes the first African American woman to join the Ladies Professional Golf Association tour, 1967
- Mae Jemison, physician and former NASA astronaut becomes first African American to travel in space, September 12, 1992
References :
Queen Bess: Daredevil Aviator. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press
http://grin.hq.nasa.gov/ABSTRACTS/GPN-2004-0002 7.html
http://www.africanamericans.com/AAFirsts.htm