H.R. No. 185
R E S O L U T I O N
WHEREAS, Texas has been home to many stellar aviation
pioneers through the years, but few stars burned as brightly as that
of the legendary aviator Bessie Coleman; and
WHEREAS, One of 13 children in a family of sharecroppers,
Bessie Coleman was born in Atlanta, Texas, on January 26, 1892, and
grew up in Waxahachie; despite the hardship of working in the cotton
fields, she received an eighth-grade education in a one-room school
and became an avid reader; her imagination was especially fired by
reading the story of Harriet Quimby, the first American woman to
earn a pilot's license and the first woman to fly solo across the
English Channel; and
WHEREAS, Ms. Coleman enrolled in the Colored Agricultural
and Normal University in Langston, Oklahoma, in 1910, but she was
forced to drop out after one term due to a lack of funds; she settled
in Chicago in 1915 and found work as a manicurist on the South Side;
when one of her brothers returned from Europe after World War I and
regaled her with stories about female pilots in France, she became
even more determined to learn to fly; and
WHEREAS, With the support of Robert Abbott, an African
American newspaper publisher, she applied to aviation schools
across the United States but was denied admission because of her
race and gender; undeterred, she learned French and moved to Paris
in 1919, where she enrolled in flight school and became part of the
Black American expatriate scene, making friends with such
luminaries as the dancer Josephine Baker; in 1921, she became the
first African American woman to become a licensed aviator when she
received her international pilot's license from the Fédération
Aéronautique Internationale; and
WHEREAS, Returning to the United States, Ms. Coleman was once
again denied work as a pilot because she was a Black woman, so she
became a barnstormer, one of the daring, itinerant aviators who
traveled from town to town across the nation, performing
spectacular aerial stunts at air shows that drew as many as 30,000
spectators; she also gave lectures and established a beauty shop in
Orlando, Florida, in order to raise money to open her own aviation
school to train Black pilots, and as she traveled the country, she
refused to perform unless the air show audiences were desegregated,
with everyone entering by the same gates; and
WHEREAS, Ms. Coleman eventually purchased her own aircraft,
a Curtiss JN-4 "Jenny," and she was testing it with her mechanic in
Jacksonville, Florida, on April 30, 1926, when the plane
malfunctioned and she fell to her death; her funeral in Chicago was
attended by 15,000 people, with a eulogy by the civil rights
activist Ida B. Wells; and
WHEREAS, In 1929, William J. Powell founded the Bessie
Coleman Aero Club in Los Angeles, a flight school that trained some
of the pilots who went on to serve with the Tuskegee Airmen during
World War II, and in 1931, the Challenger Air Pilots Association of
Chicago began an annual flight over the cemetery where she was
buried; women aviators in Chicago established the Bessie Coleman
Aviators Club in 1977, and in 1995, the U.S. Postal Service issued a
stamp in her honor; she was inducted into the National Aviation Hall
of Fame in 2006; and
WHEREAS, At a time when the aspirations of Black women were
impeded by racism and sexism, Bessie Coleman fulfilled her ambition
to become a pilot through courage and fierce determination, and she
helped inspire generations of women and African Americans, in the
Lone Star State and across the nation, to dream of taking to the
skies; now, therefore, be it
RESOLVED, That the House of Representatives of the 87th Texas
Legislature hereby pay tribute to the legacy of pioneering aviator
Bessie Coleman.
Ellzey
______________________________
Speaker of the House
I certify that H.R. No. 185 was adopted by the House on March
10, 2021, by a non-record vote.
______________________________
Chief Clerk of the House