3. DEVOTION TO GOALS – The Devotion to Goals of Bessie Coleman
To become an aviator, Bessie would have to overcome many disadvantages. She was a young African-American woman with limited schooling and little money, who lived in a segregated soci- ety and worked in a barbershop. She didn’t know any pilots, and the ones she read about were white. With one goal in mind, she worked hard and saved her money. She found pilots and asked them to be her teacher, but all of them refused. She applied to aviation schools, but none would admit her because of her race and gender. She kept looking and was soon happy to discover there were avi- ation schools in Paris that would teach anyone how to fly. So she saved more money, took French lessons, and sailed for Europe on November 20, 1920. She wasn’t going to take no for an answer. In Paris, she devoted herself to becoming a pilot. Every day, rain or shine, she walked nine miles from her room to the airfield to learn how to inspect and care for airplanes, to steer a plane with a stick in her hands and pedals under her feet, to stop after landings by digging the tail of the plane into the dirt. Finally, after seven months of lessons, Bessie achieved her goal. She earned her pilot’s license, a license that qualified her to fly airplanes anywhere in the world.
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