Bessie Coleman

Coleman left Langston, Oklahoma, after one semester, then worked in Chicago as a manicurist at the White Sox Barbershop and ran a chili parlor, the Handbook of Texas says. Robert S. Abbott, editor of the Weekly Defender, helped her contact flying schools abroad. In 1922 she made a second trip to Europe and took lessons from Fokker's chief pilot in Germany. A California accident in 1924 cost her a year. Her first Texas performance was in Houston on June 19, 1925. Sources disagree on her birthplace: the Handbook says Atlanta, the National Women's History Museum, Waxahachie.

What the plaque says

Bessie Coleman Bessie Coleman (1892-1926). The tenth of 13 children born to tenant farmers Susan and George Coleman, famed aviatrix Bessie Coleman was a native of Atlanta, Texas. The family moved to Waxahachie when Bessie was two years old. She followed her brothers to Chicago in 1915 and developed an interest in flying. Because she could find no one in the United States who would teach an African-American woman, Coleman learned to fly in France and obtained her international pilot's license in 1921. Upon her return to the United States, she was hailed as the first black woman to pilot an airplane. Bessie Coleman died in an air accident in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1926 and is buried near Chicago. (2002)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Atlanta State Park — 9.4 mi
  A shoreline park on Wright Patman Lake, leased from the Army in 1954, where Caddo ancestors farmed the Sulphur River and wagon traces such as the Bobo Ferry trace still cross the woods.
• Museum of Regional History — 22 mi
  Texarkana's oldest museum, in an 1879 brick building on State Line Avenue, with Caddo pottery, one of Scott Joplin's pianos and a research library of city directories and photographs.
• Excelsior House Hotel — 27 mi
  A brick-and-timber hotel at 211 West Austin that began as a river captain's boarding house in 1858 and was revived by a garden club in 1959, and still takes guests with rosewood furniture.
• Jefferson Historical Museum — 27 mi
  A four-floor museum in Jefferson's 1888-90 federal post office and courthouse, with rooms for African-American history, Jewish heritage, the Caddo and Diamond Bessie, bought by the historical society in 1965 for $8,100.

More markers nearby

• Atlanta-Miller Grade School — 0.2 mi
• Smyrna Baptist Church — 5.3 mi
• Cass County — 7.3 mi
• Douglassville Cemetery — 12 mi