"I decided blacks should not have to experience the difficulties I had faced, so I decided to open a flying school and teach other black women to fly"
About this Quote
Coleman turns personal hardship into a recruiting pitch for the future. The sentence is built on repetition - "I decided... so I decided..". - and that doubling matters. It reads like someone forcing history to move with willpower alone, because in her era it often did: doors didn’t open; they were kicked, climbed, or built from scratch.
The intent is practical, not symbolic. She isn’t asking for admiration; she’s outlining a plan to short-circuit the bottlenecks that kept Black women grounded. Coleman famously had to leave the United States to get flight training because American schools shut her out on both race and gender. That experience sits behind the phrase "the difficulties I had faced", which functions as a compressed archive of Jim Crow humiliation, institutional exclusion, and the extra burden of proving you belong in a space designed to reject you.
The subtext is sharper: representation is not enough if access stays scarce. By imagining a flying school, Coleman is talking about infrastructure - a pipeline, not a one-off miracle. She’s refusing the trap of being a lone exception that the system can point to as evidence of fairness. Instead, she frames her achievement as a tool meant to be redistributed.
Context makes the ambition almost radical. Aviation in the 1910s and 1920s was new, dangerous, glamorous - a public stage where modernity was being defined in real time. Coleman’s dream wasn’t just to fly; it was to ensure Black women could claim the sky as a workplace, a spectacle, and a symbol of possibility on their own terms.
The intent is practical, not symbolic. She isn’t asking for admiration; she’s outlining a plan to short-circuit the bottlenecks that kept Black women grounded. Coleman famously had to leave the United States to get flight training because American schools shut her out on both race and gender. That experience sits behind the phrase "the difficulties I had faced", which functions as a compressed archive of Jim Crow humiliation, institutional exclusion, and the extra burden of proving you belong in a space designed to reject you.
The subtext is sharper: representation is not enough if access stays scarce. By imagining a flying school, Coleman is talking about infrastructure - a pipeline, not a one-off miracle. She’s refusing the trap of being a lone exception that the system can point to as evidence of fairness. Instead, she frames her achievement as a tool meant to be redistributed.
Context makes the ambition almost radical. Aviation in the 1910s and 1920s was new, dangerous, glamorous - a public stage where modernity was being defined in real time. Coleman’s dream wasn’t just to fly; it was to ensure Black women could claim the sky as a workplace, a spectacle, and a symbol of possibility on their own terms.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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