The Aviatrix: The Daredevil Life of Bessie Coleman, the First Black Woman to Fly

For a brief and brilliant moment in the early 1920s, Bessie Coleman was one of the most famous people in America. Her performances were tracked meticulously by Black newspapers from Chicago to Los Angeles, written up in the New York Times, and celebrated in lecture halls across the country. Bessie’s aerial acrobatics—figure eights, stalls, dives, tailspins, and loop-the-loops—were as dazzling as they were dangerous, and they drew thousands of spectators to open fields on the outskirts of cities and small towns, where Bessie appeared suddenly (and loudly) in the cockpit of her plane, as if conjured from their imaginations.

Then, almost overnight, she disappeared, killed in a plane crash in 1926. Bessie’s death was only the beginning of a long compression of her extraordinary life into a few lines of inspirational copy in children’s books, a face on a commemorative stamp, and a tale traded among pilots. While these tributes to Bessie’s life are deservedly reverent—she was, after all, the first Black woman to surmount the many obstacles to success that were thrown in her path—they fail to return to Bessie the thing that fame most reliably destroys: her humanity.

Working with a historical record that is nearly nonexistent—she left no official papers and few artifacts—The Aviatrix resurrects Bessie. For the first time, Lena Andrews has assembled a kaleidoscopic biography that gives us the whole story of Bessie’s pioneering life; and it is some story.

Born at the bleeding edge of the American frontier, Bessie educated herself out of deep poverty, came of age in the grit and grime of Chicago, bootstrapped her way across Europe, and returned home a minor aviation celebrity—where, improbably and imperfectly, she engineered her own rise to national fame. The portrait that emerges gives readers a rich reward: The Aviatrix reveals not just what made Bessie a hero, but what made her human.