2023-D Bessie Coleman Washington Quarter (American Women)

Denver produced 317,200,000 Bessie Coleman quarters in 2023, the highest mintage among all five American Women designs that year. Bessie Coleman (1892-1926) was the first African American and first Native American woman to earn a pilot's license, traveling to Paris to train after every American flight school rejected her. She became a barnstorming sensation who refused to perform before segregated audiences. The open-cockpit reverse by Chris Costello captures Coleman with aviator goggles pushed up, looking skyward.

About Bessie Coleman

Before pursuing aviation, Coleman worked as a manicurist in Chicago and took French classes at a Berlitz school, encouraged by Chicago Defender publisher Robert S. Abbott. She trained on a Nieuport 82 biplane at the Caudron Brothers' school in Le Crotoy, France, then returned to Europe in 1922 for advanced instruction in the Netherlands and Germany. Known as "Queen Bess" and "Brave Bessie," she specialized in figure eights, loops, and low-altitude dives that made her one of the most popular barnstormers in the country. She survived a serious crash in February 1923 at Santa Monica when her engine stalled during takeoff, suffering a broken leg and fractured ribs, but insisted doctors patch her up for the next show. Coleman dreamed of opening a flight school for Black Americans. She never realized that goal, but ten thousand mourners attended her funeral services in Chicago, led in part by journalist and activist Ida B. Wells. Her legacy reached as far as the Tuskegee Airmen and astronaut Mae Jemison, who carried Coleman's photograph aboard the Space Shuttle in 1992.