Vintage Times-Union: Pioneering Black pilot Bessie Coleman falls to her death over Jacksonville in 1926

The daring aviatrix Bessie Coleman plunged to her death in Jacksonville in 1926, falling 2,000 feet from an airplane over the Westside.

It was April 30th, 96 years ago, during a practice flight before a May 1 airshow in which she was scheduled to perform her thrilling aerial stunts.

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The lead headline of the afternoon edition of the Jacksonville Journal was big: "Jax Airplane Crash Kills Two." The headline in the next morning's Times-Union was smaller but more elegant: "Death at controls of airplane as two are flung from the sky."

The stories recounted how Coleman — the first Black woman to get a pilot's license — fell to her death from an out-of-control plane piloted by William Wills, who was killed as the plane exploded on impact. News reports said a wrench had slid and jammed into the "control gears" of the plane.

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The death of the woman known as "Queen Bess" was headline news across the country, and hundreds if not thousands mourned at a service for her in Jacksonville, then again at other services as a train carried her body to Chicago.

Coleman, the daughter of Texas sharecroppers, was intrepid: When schools in America wouldn't teach her to fly, she went to language school to learn French, then traveled to France to get her pilot's license in 1921.

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She was photogenic and bold, and she soon became a celebrity, a favorite of the influential Chicago Defender newspaper, a Black publication that often put her on the front page.

“The air is the only place free from prejudices,” she once said.

In 2006 Coleman was inducted into the Aviation Hall of Fame, and a main road at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago is named Bessie Coleman Drive.

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In 2012 a bronze plaque with her likeness was installed next to the front doors of Paxon School for Advanced Studies, which in the 1920s was the site of the airfield where Coleman's fatal flight began. It was unveiled by members of the Bessie Coleman Aerospace Legacy Inc., founded by a group of Black female pilots who have followed in her path.

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: First Black woman pilot Bessie Coleman died in Jacksonville in 1926