1921 Doings

My cousin Bill, down in South Texas, will be 96 on June 30th.  Naturally there is a party planned.  You don't go empty-handed to a birthday (usually) but what do you give a man 96 years old?!  Surely, he has plenty of "stuff"? 

I looked up June 30, 1921, but nothing appealed.  When I widened the search to June, 1921, I found better stuff than limiting it to one day.

The Southwark Bridge, London, was dedicated by King George V and Queen Mary.

Brazil adopted women's suffrage.

There was a race riot in Tulsa, OK, that killed 21 whites and 60 blacks.  I thought race riots were a '60s-'70s thing ...

Bessie Coleman reached France.  She covered a number of firsts - first black woman, first Native American, first woman - to have earned a US pilot's license.  In 2013, she was listed as  #14 on Flying magazine's 51 Heroes of Aviation.

She was born in 1892 as the 10th of 13 children.  Early on, she was fascinated by flying and worked two jobs to get the money for flying lessons which were denied her in America.  So she went to France where she was allowed to train. 

On her return, she performed in aerial circuses, but she was dead at 36.  Prior to an air circus she and her mechanic and PR man, William Wills,  took her plane up because she intended to do a parachute jump from it the next day and wanted to see her route to get out of the cockpit.  For that reason, she wasn't wearing  seat belt when the plane (which had been having mechanical difficulties) suddenly went into a dive, spun and ejected her.  She fell 2,000 ft. and died instantly on impact.  Wills was unable to control the plane which crashed and killed him, too.

Looking for one thing is so often the start of learning something new that you had never considered or heard of before.