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