A01=Carole Hopson
African American history
Airplanes
Amelia Earhardt
Amelia Earhart
Author_Carole Hopson
aviation
aviatrix
Bessie Coleman
Black History Month
Black pioneers
Category=FC
Category=FV
Charles Lindbergh
Chicago
combat pilot
eq_bestseller
eq_fiction
eq_historical-fiction
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
feminism
flight school
France
Jazz age
Jesse Binga
Jim WWI Germany
Josephine Baker
Pilot
Queen Bess
Robert Sengstacke Abbott
The Great Migration
Woman pilot
women in STEM
Women's History
women's rights
Product details
- ISBN 9781250347220
- Dimensions: 137 x 211mm
- Publication Date: 22 Sep 2025
- Publisher: Henry Holt & Company Inc
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
A few years after the Wright brothers’ first flight, Bessie was working the Texas cotton fields with her family when an airplane flew over their heads. It buzzed so low she thought she could catch it in her hands. Bessie was fearless. She knew there was freedom in those wings.
The daughter of a woman born into slavery, Bessie answers the call of the Great Migration. She moves to Chicago, where she wins the backing of two wealthy, powerful Black men - Robert Abbott, creator and publisher of the Chicago Defender, and Jesse Binga, the founder of Chicago’s first Black bank. Abbott becomes her mentor, while Binga becomes her lover. Her true first love, though, remains flying.
But in 1920, no one in the United States will train a Black woman to fly. So, twenty-eight-year-old Bessie learns to speak French and sets off for Europe. Two years ahead of Amelia Earhart, Bessie earns her pilot’s license, and later she learns death-defying stunts from French and German dogfighting combat pilots.
While she finds no prejudice in the air, Bessie wrestles with other challenges on the ground. A plane crash nearly kills her, her brothers seem to be crumbling under the weight of Jim Crow, and, while grappling with tough truths about Binga, Bessie begins to wonder if the freedom she finds in the sky means she must otherwise fly solo.
With tenderness and mastery, Carole Hopson imagines the breathtaking moxie Bessie Coleman harnessed in order to lift herself out of poverty and become known as “Queen Bess.”
