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Americans who've made significant contributions to our country have always come wrapped in different packages. Look closely, and you will sometimes even be surprised at who did what. February, since it's Black History Month, especially provides a wealth of inspiring stories about people who've been integral, often facing enormous adversity, to ensure the equality for all that is the aspiration at the heart of what our country was founded on.

Being a woman, I've always found people like Sojourner Truth and Ida B. Wells to be really interesting and important in activism and leadership, as well as plain womanliness. While it's recent, it may also be of future note to mention the other woman in this past memorable election, Cynthia McKinney (Presidential candidate for the Green Party).

There are others, though, who sort of fascinate me, like Gwendolyn Brooks, a female poet who became the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize (1950), that would fall into the category of important women in African American history. In both lesser-known but still significant contributions and in having first' bragging rights, their stories are pretty cool.

One of my all-time faves is pilot Bessie Coleman (January 26, 1892 - April 30, 1926). A Texas native, she was tenth in the line-up of thirteen. Her parents were share-croppers, but early on, dad took off. As she grew, she helped her mom take care of her younger sibs and excelled in math through all of her available eight years of education.

She briefly attended the Colored Agricultural and Normal University in Langston, Oklahoma in 1910, but left after one term due to lack of funds. At home the bleakness of her future probably started to set in, but rather than give in to it, she took a chance and moved to Chicago, where two of her brothers let her live with them while she tried to find a job and figure out what to do.

Happenstance or design, here is where the tide starts to turn. In Chicago, working as a barber shop manicurist, she hears all these pilots talking about the war and how, in France, women were already becoming pilots. Being both black and a women, there was no chance of her getting into any American flight schools. Thwarted again.

However, at the barber shop, she meets and hangs around with the likes of Robert S. Abbott, founder and publisher of the Chicago Defender. (Talk about being in the right place at the right time!) So, she helps him promote the paper, he advises her and encourages her to go for her dreams

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