In the early 1920s, the most daring stunt pilot in the world stood on a movie set, looked at the tattered rags and walking stick the script demanded she wear, and walked away from the payday that would have funded her life’s dream. That tension defines Bessie Coleman: a flamboyant, death-defying daredevil in the air, and an immovably principled woman on the ground. Born in 1892 to Texas sharecroppers, the tenth of thirteen children, she walked four miles to a one-room schoolhouse, lost her education to every cotton harvest, and made it exactly one term into college before the money ran out.

Then came the master class in strategic problem solving. Working as a Chicago manicurist and chili parlor manager, she built a literal flight fund, won the backing of Chicago Defender publisher Robert Abbott, enrolled in Berlitz classes to learn French, and sailed to France, because no American aviation school would admit a Black woman. On June 15, 1921 she earned an international license from the FAI, bypassing the discriminatory U.S. system entirely, and came home as Queen Bess, the barnstormer who packed air shows with loops, figure eights, and near-ground dips. Every stunt was a funding mechanism for her real goal: a flight school for African-American aviators.

• The hustle behind the history: why she learned French before touching a plane, and what it took to muscle a wood-and-canvas Nieuport through the sky with a baseball-bat control stick
• Principles at the box office: her flat refusal to perform for segregated audiences, and the movie role she abandoned rather than play a stereotype, even with her school’s funding on the line
• The tragedy of April 30, 1926: a secondhand Jenny that needed three forced landings just to reach Jacksonville, an unharnessed scouting flight, and the stray wrench that jammed the controls
• A legacy that outflew her: a funeral of 10,000 led by Ida B. Wells, the Bessie Coleman Aero Club, Mae Jemison carrying her photograph into orbit, and a mountain on Pluto named Coleman Mons