Bessie Coleman boarded a ship to France in 1920, after every American flight school refused to teach a Black woman to fly. She was twenty-eight, working as a manicurist in a Chicago barbershop, listening to pilots tell stories of the war. Every door in her own country had been closed. She had learned French at night, saved every dollar, and decided the ocean was a smaller obstacle than the people around her.

She came back the first Black woman in the world to hold a pilot’s license.