On April 30, 1926, a wrench left in the gears of a Curtiss Jenny biplane brought down one of aviation's most improbable pioneers. Bessie Coleman fell 2,000 feet over Jacksonville, Florida, ending a life that had already rewritten the rules of who got to fly.

This deep dive traces how a sharecropper's daughter from Waxahachie, Texas, walked eight miles a day to a one-room schoolhouse, worked as a Chicago manicurist, taught herself French, and crossed the Atlantic twice to earn the credentials American flight schools refused to grant her. By 1921, she held an international pilot's license from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, training under the engineers who designed the Red Baron's planes.

We unpack the brutal economics of sharecropping, the mechanics of the temperamental Curtiss OX-5 engine, the cutthroat world of 1920s bar ...