Before Amelia Earhart, there was Bessie Coleman — the first Black aviatrix who took her race from the cotton fields to the clouds.

There aren’t a lot of options for a Black girl in rural Waxahachie Texas in 1917. Dissatisfied with the choice between picking cotton and laundering cotton, Bessie decides to travel to Chicago to join her older brothers, Johnny, a dissolute World War One veteran, and Walter (a pullman porter whose holier-than-thou wife Willie is at odds with Bessie’s ambitions) and her cherished nephew, Arthur. Although Bessie soon becomes a successful manicurist and leads a more “stylish” life than in Texas, she’s still unsatisfied – until Johnny inspires her with a story of seeing a woman flyer in Paris.

Bessie is seized by the image and passionately pursues her new dream. She struggles to break into a sky primarily populated by white men and is repeatedly rejected. Undaunted (and with the help of the Chicago Defender, a nationally respected Black newspaper), she pursues her quest in France, where race and gender barriers don’t exist.

Upon returning to America, Bessie has to negotiate fame and the never-ending plight of raising funds to fly, which Johnny dismisses as being “a flying sharecropper.” Seizing an opportunity to make money starring in a movie, “Negroes in the Air,” Bessie is dismayed to discover it’s a slapdash, stereotypical effort and walks off the set, losing the invaluable support of the Chicago Defender. After her brother Johnny reminds her that her dream is greater than herself, Bessie becomes determined to encourage women and people of color to fly so they can experience the freedom she’s found in the sky.

To raise funds for her flying school, Bessie travels around the country performing breathtaking aerial shows as a “barnstormer.” While her plans seem to end with her tragic death in a flying accident, her nephew Arthur goes on to become a World War II flyer with the Tuskegee Airmen, thus enabling Bessie to posthumously fulfill her dream.

Song Samples