When outgoing defense secretary Leon Panetta lifted the military ban against women serving in combat, a common phrase heard in response to his decision was this: women have been serving for decades in combat zones indirectly, and risking their lives. The lifting of the ban was merely a formality that in many ways acknowledged the bravery and sacrifices women in the military have been making for decades.
New York’s Daily News has published an essay with a similar theme in honor of black women to commemorate Black History Month. Much as women in general have been contributing without appreciation for their level of service, the significant participation of African-American women in the military has been largely overlooked — perhaps to an even greater extent.
“According to the Indiana-based Buffalo Soldiers Research Museum, African-American women have played a role in every war effort in United States history,” writes Jay Mwamba of the Daily News. “And black women participated in spite of the twin evils of racial and gender discrimination.”
Nwamba goes on to recount the heroic feats of black women who fought for the American way in creative, mind-blowing ways, pushing themselves to the limit to enhance various military efforts. Harriet Tubman, who acted as a spy, nurse and scout during the Civil War. Cathay Williams, who, after being freed from a plantation by a Union contingent, pretended to be a man so that she could enlist in a peacetime army.
“For two years — until she fell ill and her ruse was discovered — Williams served as a Buffalo Soldier with the 38th U.S. Infantry Regiment,” Mwamba relates.
Now that is truth being stranger than fiction.
But we don’t have to go back to 1866, the year Williams enlisted, to find African-American sheroes engaging in daring feats. As recently as 2009, U.S. Navy Vice Admiral Michelle Janine Howard used military might to wrestle with forces of darkness. The first black woman to command a Navy combat ship, Howard made headlines when her vessel tangled with Somali pirates in the process of rescuing the captain of a merchant ship from captivity.
Born February 6, 1955 in Chicago, Illinois, Robert Townsend first became famous for writing, producing, and directing the 1987 independent feature film Hollywood Shuffle, a satire based on the hardships and obstacles that black actors undergo in movie industry, which he famously funded with credit cards. His next feature, The Five Heartbeats (1991), was a nostalgic look back at male R&B groups of the 1960s. Townsend also had success in television with his award-winning Partners In Crime variety shows for HBO as well as his 1995-1999 WB sitcom The Parent ‘Hood. To learn more about Townsend’s life and career, click 
Nesta Robert Marley, 
Kelvin Okafor, 27, is wowing art critics around the world – one pencil stroke at a time.
MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — In 1931, Alabama wanted to execute the black Scottsboro Boys because two white women claimed they were gang-raped. Now, state officials are trying to exonerate them in a famous case from the segregated South that some consider the beginning of the modern civil rights movement.
Western lowland gorilla. Credit: Thomas Breuer/Wildlife Conservation Society/Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology