Today in 1892, the birthday of Bessie Coleman.
She became famous as the first African-American woman to get an international pilot’s license and fly airplanes.
But before she broke barriers in the sky, she made a name for herself in another line of work: manicures.
Coleman was born in Texas, and eventually moved to Chicago as one of the millions who took part in the Great Migration.
At first she worked odd jobs, but to make a living, she trained at Chicago’s Burnham School of Beauty Culture.
That was one of the few fields at that time in which a Black woman could make money.
A few, like Madam CJ Walker or Marjorie Steward Joyner, had even become prominent and wealthy.
Coleman had, by all accounts, always been ambitious, so it’s not a surprise that she might try to do the same.
And at least to a degree, she was a success: in 1916, she won a contest that named her the best manicurist in Black Chicago.
But around that time, Coleman had other career interests: she was one of the many people in those times who was paying a lot of attention to airplanes and pilots.
Her brothers had served in Europe during World War I, and they told her about how European women didn’t just watch others fly planes, they flew themselves.
Coleman started imagining herself at the controls of a plane.
Since her brothers had pointed out that American flight schools weren’t interested in training Black women to be pilots, she decided to go to Europe herself.
She saved her manicurist money, took a second job on the side and started taking French classes at night so she could apply to a European flight school.
And her plan worked: Coleman won a spot in a training program in France, and ten months after she’d left for Europe, she flew back to the United States as a fully licensed pilot.
Starting today in Elko, Nevada, it’s the 41st National Cowboy Poetry Gathering.
The weeklong gathering will have lots of open mics and workshops for people who are inspired to write a verse where the deer and the antelope play.
But there will also be live music, crafts like beadworking and hatmaking, and a session on making the perfect Basque cheesecake.
I’m pretty sure I would write a poem about the cheesecake.
Poisons Part I: The Mercurial World of Felt (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco)
Nancy Dickerson, 70, First Woman to Be a Reporter at CBS (New York Times)
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Image from the Miriam Matthews Photograph Collection, UCLA Library Digital Collections, via Wikicommons
