- [Duchess] My grandmother was born in 1907, in Covington, Georgia.

She was able to go to college, which was extremely unusual for black Americans at the time, because she was born only 60 years after slavery ended.

And in 1943, she and 10 other women were in the first class to work at NACA.

When World War II broke out, most of the employees at NACA of course, were white men.

They were deployed to go fight for the war.

And so then they started touching into the educated class of white women, so they got as many as they could find, but they ran out.

So out of expediency they went to the historically black college and went to see if there were enough black women who could pass the civil service exam, to work at NACA.

Historically this was a big deal, because Franklin Delano Roosevelt had just signed Executive Order 8802, it was against the law for African-Americans to work for the federal government until he signed that order.

And so this was the beginning of a new America.

- [Operator] 10, nine, eight, seven.

- NACA was really top-secret so people ask me all the time, did she understand how important the work was that she was doing?

She really didn't understand because sometimes she wasn't allowed to know what she was doing.

She eventually learned that she worked on Friendship 7, which was a very big deal at the time.

And she also had the opportunity to meet John Glenn.

What I want young people to do is learn the whole story, of what it meant to have this kind of profession, given the history and the background of the place, and the women and to think about the politics of possibility to think about perseverance and what it means if you want something bad enough.

If you put yourself in a situation to get it, it can be possible.