2023-P Bessie Coleman

The 2023-P Bessie Coleman quarter honors the first African American and first Native American woman to earn a pilot's license, a credential she traveled to France to obtain in June 1921 after every American flight school turned her away. Coleman trained at the Caudron Brothers' School at Le Crotoy on her own savings and earnings she pulled from manicuring and managing a chili parlor in Chicago, returned to the United States as a licensed aviator, and made her name on the barnstorming circuit performing loops, figure-eights, and parachute jumps before paying audiences until her death in a flight-test accident in Jacksonville in 1926. Philadelphia struck 302,000,000 pieces in 2023, the third-highest Philadelphia output of the program through that year, sending Coleman's portrait into circulation across the eastern Federal Reserve districts within weeks of the January release.

Laura Gardin Fraser's 1932 Washington portrait covers the obverse. The reverse, designed by United States Mint Artistic Infusion Program artist Chris Costello and sculpted by Eric David Custer, shows Coleman in pilot's leather cap and flight goggles with a biplane banking through clouds behind her. Composition follows the program standard of 91.67 percent copper and 8.33 percent nickel clad over a pure copper core, 5.67 grams, 24.3 millimeters, with a reeded edge. Authentication on circulation strikes turns on weight tolerance and the sharpness of the biplane's wing struts, which are among the first design elements to soften on worn dies or counterfeit planchets.

Roll-fresh material from 2023 remains readily available and trades near face value in raw form, with Professional Coin Grading Service (PCGS) and Numismatic Guaranty Company (NGC) Mint State 67 examples sitting at modest premiums and Mint State 68 holders carrying meaningful price jumps where population reports show fewer than several hundred examples. Read more on our Washington Quarters (American Women) series history.