From Newsbreak

Bessie Coleman’s journey began far from the runways and open skies she would one day claim. Born in 1892 in Atlanta, Texas, she grew up in a sharecropping family where poverty, racism, and backbreaking labor shaped daily life. Her parents, George and Susan Coleman, struggled to support thirteen children in the Jim Crow South. Bessie picked cotton from an early age, developing a resilience that would follow her into adulthood. Her father, of mixed Cherokee and African American heritage, left the family in 1901 to seek opportunity in Oklahoma, leaving Bessie and her mother to shoulder the responsibility of caring for younger siblings.