![]() After earning a degree from Columbia University’s journalism school, she worked as a beat reporter and stringer before moving into communications for the National Hockey League. In Coleman’s perseverance despite racial barriers (being born at a time when no one wanted to train Black women to become pilots) and despite debilitating injury (breaking her leg and fracturing her ribs, only to get back in the pilot’s seat)-Cary-Hopson found inspiration, so much so that she has even written a yet-to-be-published novel based on Coleman’s life.Ĭary-Hopson’s own path to becoming a pilot was circuitous. Coleman’s story was a revelation for Cary-Hopson, who was in the early stages of becoming a pilot. “As I read it, I said, ‘How could I be 34 years old and not even know who Bessie Coleman is? How could I not know that?’” Cary-Hopson tells me. Cary-Hopson stopped in the middle of the convention floor, gobsmacked by the discovery of a woman she never knew. Where is everyone?Ĭarole Cary-Hopson was first introduced to Coleman’s story while attending the Women in Aviation Convention in Denver in 1998, when she met a woman selling mugs with Coleman’s photo and a brief biography of the aviation pioneer. And while Black women in 2020 don’t face the same barriers Coleman did in 1920s America, the persistent underrepresentation of Black women pilots puzzles. FIRST BLACK FEMALE FIGHTER PILOT LICENSEpilots, according to the FAA.) In total, fewer than 150 Black women hold any type of pilot license in the United States, according to SOS. FIRST BLACK FEMALE FIGHTER PILOT PROFESSIONALAnd since I first heard of Coleman, I’ve been on the lookout for Black women pilots: on planes and panels, and in concourses and airport terminals.īut today, fewer than 1 percent of airline pilots in the United States are Black women, according to Sisters of the Skies (SOS), a professional organization of Black women pilots founded in 2018. It is this story that always and immediately exists in my mind when I think of Coleman, as if she was a direct descendant of this myth. That these spirituals foretold the reality of Black flight for her long before a pithy remark by her older brother inspired her to take to the skies in a 27-foot Nieuport across the fields of the Somme. I’ll fly away, oh Lord/I’ll fly away or I got wings/You got wings/All God’s children got wings. I like to imagine that her dreams as a little girl in Texas in the early 1900s consisted of “black shiny wings flappin’ against the blue up there” that she sang spirituals on those Sundays between the school year and the wretchedness of cotton-picking season. This is how I like to imagine that the world’s first Black woman aviator, Bessie Coleman, might too have heard this story. Black, shiny wings flappin’ against the blue up there.” And they flew like blackbirds over the fields. And they would walk up on the air like climbin’ up on a gate. Folklorist Virginia Hamilton even recorded the story and published it in her book, The People Could Fly, writing, “Say that long ago in Africa, some of the people knew magic. It seemed so fantastic, but there we were, singing and dreaming of flight, real and imagined. Perhaps I had always known it, in my bones, in my blood. I knew this story, but I didn’t know how. In his retelling, enslaved Africans who took matters of their freedom into their own hands felt more than familiar to me. That Black people, brought here from Africa, forced to work in fields, carried knowledge and the ability to fly. The earliest story I was told of Black people flying came from the mouth of a griot, an oral storyteller, who traveled around to Black churches in Milwaukee decades ago when I was a little girl. “If you surrender to the air, you can ride it.” ![]()
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