“I shall never be satisfied until we have men of the Race who can fly,” she told the black newspaper The Chicago Defender in 1921, adding, “We must have aviators if we are to keep pace with the times.”

Coleman borrowed planes at first, but in time she saved up enough to buy one of her own, a military surplus Curtiss JN-4, known informally as the Jenny. Coleman went to Santa Monica, Calif., to pick it up.

While in California she planned to perform an air show near Los Angeles, but as she took off to fly to the fairgrounds, her motor stalled, and she nose-dived from 300 feet, breaking a leg, fracturing her ribs and destroying her plane. She begged the doctor at the scene to “patch her up” so that she could get to the show. He called for an ambulance.

“Tell them all that as soon as I can walk I’m going to fly!” Coleman wrote in a telegram to her fans.

It took her months to recover, and it was two years before she was flying regularly again.

Coleman lived in Chicago and then Houston, staging air shows all around Texas but increasingly spending time on the lecture circuit, a safer and more remunerative way to make a point about social uplift.

By April 1926, Coleman had saved enough money to buy another plane — another surplus Jenny. She scheduled an air show for May 1, and on April 30 she and her co-pilot, a mechanic named William Wills, took a practice flight in the new plane. Coleman sat in the second cockpit, unharnessed so that she could peer over the side and identify a good place for a parachute landing during the show.