“Brave Bessie” was born in 1893 less than a dozen miles from the Arkansas border in the northeast Texas community of Atlanta. Her father, who was three-quarters Cherokee, returned to his reservation ...

Early 20th-century America didn’t offer many career paths to people like Bessie Coleman. It was a time when women were ...

Bessie Coleman was the first African-American woman, and also the first woman of Native-American descent, to hold a pilot’s license. Coleman grew up in a cruel world of poverty and discrimination.