BIRTHPLACE OF QUEEN BESS

The Atlanta Historical museum puts children front and center in all of its exhibits, weaving a young person’s perspective into stories of railroads, farming, military history, and aviation. Additionally, the museum offers aviator fans an opportunity to explore one of the most interesting stories in aviation history – the brief but remarkable career of the first African American female aviator Bessie Coleman. Coleman was born in Atlanta, although she grew up in Waxahachie, and the Atlanta Historical Museum helps tell her story through photographs and artifacts, including a scale model of her Curtiss Jenny bi-wing plane. Coleman had to travel to Europe in order to learn to fly and earn her pilot’s license where the absence of prejudices against African Americans and women, common throughout America in the 1920s, helped her to succeed. Once receiving her license, Coleman trained in the Netherlands and Germany to refine her skills as a stunt flier, returning to America as “Queen Bess” and billed as “the world’s greatest woman flier”, performing daredevil routines in airshows across the country.