What’s with Queen Bess? In the spring of 1926, Jacksonville’s Negro Welfare League invited the only Black woman in America with a pilot’s license to headline its May Day festival — and Bessie Coleman came. Born in Texas in 1892, of African American and Native American heritage, she had been refused by every American flight school she approached; so she learned French, sailed for Paris, and in 1921 became the first African American woman and the first Native American woman in the world to earn a pilot’s license. As Brave Bessie, the barnstorming Queen Bess, she insisted on a single entrance for every ticket holder at her shows — and won. Her Jacksonville days were spent doing what she loved beyond flying itself: speaking to the city’s Black schoolchildren, urging them toward the sky, her dream of a flight school nearly funded at last. In 2023 the United States Mint honored her on a quarter in the American Women Quarters Program — suited for flight, beside the date of her license: 6.15.1921.
The Navy settled the river in the 1940s — Naval Air Station Jacksonville in 1940, Naval Station Mayport at the river’s mouth in 1942 — and shipyards worked around the clock through the war; the carriers and the naval air overhead have been part of the city’s weather ever since. In 1968 Jacksonville and Duval County consolidated into a single government, and the city woke up the largest by land area in the contiguous United States: room enough inside the limits for the Atlantic beaches — off which the North Atlantic right whale, the most endangered of the great whales, comes to calve each winter — 80,000 acres of parks, the centuries-old Treaty Oak on the Southbank, Friendship Fountain facing the skyline, and the cable-stayed sweep of the Dames Point Bridge downriver.
Why People Visit Jacksonville Florida
Jacksonville offers a Prairie School downtown no one expects in the South, a great river running the wrong way to the sea, beaches without the resort crowds, live oaks and marsh preserves, shrimp boats and naval carriers sharing one river mouth, and neighborhoods that kept their bones. Visitors come for the beaches, the river, the architecture, the parks, and the easy room of the biggest city in America. On the St. Johns since 1822.