Good morning everyone. Last year my Dad turned 80. When we asked him if there was anything he’d like to do to celebrate, he said he wanted to tour the WW1 battlefields in France and Belgium.

So during the May half-term I went over there with my brother and our parents and we spent a week exploring Flanders and the Somme region, as I know many of you have done on school trips.

At the end of the week I dropped the others at Charles de Gaulle airport for their early morning flight home, and treated myself to a day of birdwatching near Calais before catching the ferry to Dover.

I spent a delightful day at the coast, enjoying turtle doves and nightingales and my first ever Marsh Warbler, which I was very excited about. Species number 626 on my life list, in case you are wondering.

I also stumbled across an information board that caught my eye. It was in French so I couldn’t entirely understand it, but it had pictures, and seemed to be about a pilot from the WW1 era.

What caught my eye was the fact that the pilot appeared to be black and female. A week of touring the battlefields and learning about the war had taught me that all pilots in those very early days of flight were white and male. I jotted down the name Bessie Colman in my notebook, and told myself that I would do some research when I got home. And I’m glad I did. Bessie Colman’s story is quite remarkable, and I’m grateful to Rev Child for the chance to share it with you now.

Her story is one of achieving a dream in the face of racist and sexist discrimination.

I hope that in our more enlightened times none of you will suffer similar discrimination, but there will almost certainly be situations where you are denied the chance to do what you want, possibly just because someone else gets chosen ahead of you.

You might not have got picked for the A team for tomorrow’s match, or get the role you want in the musical, or be selected to be a prefect, or get into the university of your choice. If that does happen to you, hopefully this story will encourage you not to give up.

To set the scene, the Wright brothers flew their famous first flight in the year 1903. Young Bessie Colman was 11 years old at that time, growing up in Texas, and like many young people of the day, she was captivated by the idea of flight, and dreamt of getting the chance to fly herself.

One of her brothers served with the army in WW1 and got to witness some of the first ever aerial combat action, taking place over his head as he dug and repaired trenches. When he returned home, he told his sister about these airborne daredevils, and she decided that was definitely what she wanted to do.

The trouble was that Colman was not only female and black, she was also of native American descent. In those days, any one of these things made it impossible to get a pilot’s licence in America. She was also poor, which was another significant barrier.

Colman was determined to fly planes, and while her race and gender made this impossible in America, she knew from what her brother told her that things were different in France.

However, getting the money to travel across the Atlantic, and pay for flying lessons when she got there, proved an almost insurmountable hurdle. Education and employment opportunities for black women were limited in those days. Colman left her home in Texas and joined her brother in Chicago, got qualified as a beautician and started to earn money as a manicurist.

She also knew there would be a language barrier in France. Unlike these days, she couldn’t rely on everyone speaking English, so she took French lessons in the evenings.

After 2 years, she had earned enough money, and learned enough French, to start her adventure. She sailed for France on 20th November 1920 and enrolled at a flight school near Calais. During her 10 months of training, she learnt the basics, and soon moved on to advanced aerobatics.

This was still in the early days of flight, when mechanical failure and crashes were all too common. One of Colman’s fellow students was killed before the completing the course, but Colman was undeterred and passed with flying colours. When she got her licence from the Federation Aeronautique Internationale, she became the first American of any race or gender to be awarded these credentials.

Once qualified, she embarked on a career as a stunt pilot, performing barrel rolls and loop the loops at airshows across Europe and America. She became something of a celebrity, flying under the name “Queen Bess, Daredevil Aviatrix”. She survived a crash in which she sustained a broken leg and ribs, but bounced back, and added parachute jumps to her shows, walking along the wing of a plane at 3000 feet before jumping off and landing safely in the arena.

While all her dreams were coming true, Colman was aware that she was something of a trailblazer for black women, and was determined not to forget her roots, or be taken advantage of.

In 1922 she signed a contract to be the star of a Hollywood movie, but shortly after filming started, she walked off the set, as her role reinforced all the negative stereotypes of black people at the time.

Colman also took a stand against various forms of racial discrimination. At many of the airshows she performed at, there had been separate entrances for black and white people, and in some cases black people were not permitted to attend at all. Colman refused to perform at any such venue, and forced organisers to change their policies.

One of her ambitions was to open a flight school specifically for African Americans, but sadly she didn’t live to see this happen as she died in a crash in 1926, while practising for an airshow in Florida.

She died young, aged 34, but she died doing what she loved. And while she may not have opened her flight school during her lifetime, she had succeeded in breaking barriers and inspired other women and black americans to follow in her footsteps. When in 1992, Mae Jamieson became the first African American women in space, she took with her a photo of Bessie Colman.

If Bessie Colman told her friends in Texas that she wanted to be a pilot, they would probably have laughed at her. That simply isn’t possible, they would have said. Don’t waste your time. You are a woman. You are black. You are poor. The chances of you getting to be a pilot are 1000000 to 1.

This morning’s reading is a Psalm written by King David when it seemed that the whole world was against him. His own son was trying to depose him and he called out to God for help.

“You Lord are a shield around me, and the one who lifts my head high…I will not fear though tens of thousands assail me on every side”.

It is words like these that give me strength when things aren’t going well and I feel like the world is against me. I don’t just imagine that I can just sit on my backside and wait for God sort everything out for me. But it gives me hope that if we can follow the example of someone like Bessie Colman, explore every possible avenue, work hard and never give up, there is no reason why we can’t achieve our dreams.