Aviatrix. Widely recognized as the first black female aviator. Born in Atlanta, Texas one of 13 brothers and sisters, her mother was Susan Coleman, and her father was George Coleman, a sharecropper of mixed black and Cherokee descent. When she was eighteen, she attended the Colored Agricultural and Normal University (now Langston University) in Langston, Oklahoma. She dropped out after only one semester because she could no longer afford tuition.  She went to Chicago and became a manicurist in a local barbershop. After the First World War she became inspired to learn to fly. Her ethnicity and gender barred her from flight schools in the US, so she learned from the French. She studied the language at night school and was accepted at the Caudron Brothers' School of Aviation in Le Crotoy, France. She received her international pilot's license on June 15, 1921 from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale before training in Germany with former World War I flying aces, from whom she learned the intricacies of the aircraft, before returning to the United States. In 1922, she first performed in public, she became famous as a barnstormer pilot, and became popular both in the United States and in Europe. Known as "Brave Bessie," or "Queen Bess" she appeared in shows all around the country as an exhibition pilot demanding all attendees, regardless of color were allowed to use the same entry gate or she would not fly. She got her way. After an accident, when her plane stalled, and she was injured, she was quoted as saying, "Blacks should not have to experience the difficulties I have faced, so I decided to open a flying school and teach other black women to fly. For accidents may happen and there would be someone to take my place." She continued to fly for the next three years, but on April 30, 1926, at Paxon Field in Jacksonville, Florida, she went up for a practice flight in her newly purchased aircraft. Her mechanic, William Wills, piloted the plane as she surveyed the ground for a suitable parachute landing site for the next day's show. She did not buckle her seat belt, apparently because it prevented her from looking over the side the plane. Cruising at 3,500 feet, about ten minutes into the flight, the biplane accelerated and then suddenly went into a nosedive and tailspin before flipping over. She was thrown from the aircraft and fell to her death. Unable to right the aircraft, it crashed, killing Wills as well. The Bessie Coleman Aero Flying Club was founded in Los Angeles after her death and offered exhibitions and demonstration flights. On each anniversary of her death, pilots have dropped flower arrangements on her grave in Lincoln Cemetery, Chicago, Illinois.