Today I invite you to spend your 10 minutes usually dedicated to the blog watching a video instead. It comes from a PBS series on American Masters – Unladylike 2020 – Unsung Women who changed America. It is a well- executed series, alternating between documentary clips and artistic renderings, telling short stories of activists.

Given the current circumstances, where travel in general and flying specifically is curtailed for many of my generation or for others who want to help flatten the Covid-19 infection curve, I was specifically drawn to a portrait of a pilot. The first black woman pilot who was awarded an international license, as it turns out. (She HAD to learn flying in France, since the soul crushing times around 1919 in this country prevented anything that racist possibly could prevent from being shared with those deemed inferior.)

Bessie Coleman defied everything and everyone – as one of 13 children of a Texan sharecropper she migrated to Chicago and eventually fulfilled her dream of becoming a pilot and sound artist. As an activist she refused to fly at events – now being a sought-after celebrity in her late 20s – that enforced segregation between the races – a public and effective gesture. Her life was cut short at age 34 when she was thrown out of her plane during a stunt, but her goal to open flying schools for POCs was eventually met by friends who finished what she was not able to see to fruition. The video has her story but also voiced-over commentary culled from writing she left behind. It is awe inspiring.

Bessie Coleman: First African American Aviator

Here is an imagined obituary from the NYT that provides more detail; (Overlooked is a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.)

Photographs are of young ones who hopefully have more of an opportunity to choose whatever they want to pursue – I am sure there are several Bessie Colemans among them.

And here is an entire album devoted to Bess by Pursuit Groove. Click the first track and then it will unfold. I particular liked Lady Bird.