CORNELIUS COFFEY

Coffey (1903-1994) was born in Newport, Arkansas, three months before the Wright brothers' first flight. In 1925 he and a fellow mechanic, John Robinson, were lent a vacant store front by a black business man, and the two men built a one-seat airplane powered by a motorcycle engine and taught themselves to fly. Though accepted at the Curtiss Wright School of Aviation in Chicago for an aviation mechanics training course, they were refused admittance when it was discovered they were black. Their employer, a white man named Emil Mack, threatened to sue the school if the two men were not allowed to enter. When Coffey and Robinson graduated two years later, they did so at the top of their class. Coffey established the Coffey School of Aeronautics at Harlem Airport, located south of Chicago, and from 1938 to 1945 more than 1,500 black students went through the school, including many who would later become Tuskegee Airmen. After the war Coffey trained some of the first blacks to be hired as mechanics by commercial airlines. Cornelius Coffey was the first African American to hold both a pilot's and mechanic's license, and the first to have an aerial navigation intersection named after him by the FAA. He also designed a carburetor heater that prevented icing and allowed airplanes to fly in inclement weather and was the first African American to establish an aeronautical school in the United States. He died in Chicago at the age of 90.

BESSIE COLEMAN

Coleman (1892-1926) was born into a sharecropper family in Atlanta, Texas, the tenth of thirteen children. Having secured funding and receiving a passport with English and French visas, Coleman departed for France at the end of 1919. Learning to fly at the Ecole d'Aviation des Frères Caudon, she received her license from the renowned Fédération Aeronautique Internationale (FAI) on June 15, 1921. She was the first black woman ever to earn a license from the prestigious FAI and the only woman of the sixty-two candidates to earn FAI licenses during that six-month period. Coleman was greeted by a great amount of press coverage upon her return to the United States. She returned to France for further training in 1922, and came home to the States again to attract paying audiences. Creating an image of herself with a military style uniform and eloquence, she performed her first air show on September 3, 1922 at Curtiss Field near New York City, where she was billed as "the world's greatest woman flyer." Between shows, she would give lectures in black theaters and opened a beauty shop in Orlando, Florida, to accumulate funds to start an aviation school. Coleman would refuse to perform airshows unless the audiences were desegregated and everyone attending used the same gates. When she was finally able to purchase her own plane, she and her mechanic took it aloft for a test flight on April 30, 1926. The plane malfunctioned in the air, and the mechanic lost control. Coleman fell from the open cockpit several hundred feet to her death. In 1929, her dream of a flying school for African Americans became reality when the Bessie Coleman Aero Club was established in Los Angeles, California in 1929.

ROBERT L. CURBEAM, JR.

Curbeam (1962- ) is a Lt. Commander who graduated from the Naval Academy in 1984. He was selected by NASA at the end of 1994 and flew as a mission specialist on STS-85 (8/7-19/97). During his next flight, STS-98 (2/7-20/01), Curbeam helped assemble the International Space Station by logging over 19 hours in space during 3 space walks. His next flight, STS-116, is on hold pending resumption of Shuttle flights following the Columbia disaster.