This week, 60 Minutes reported on St. Mary’s Academy, a Catholic school for young black women in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Correspondent Bill Whitaker meets two former students, Calcea Johnson and Ne’Kiya Jackson, who made mathematical history by both independently proving the 2,000-year-old Pythagorean theorem using trigonometry, an achievement once thought impossible.
Whitaker asked Pamela Rogers, principal of St. Mary’s Academy, if she was shocked when she learned what the girls had accomplished.
“We weren’t shocked… our students can do anything. And that’s what we tell them. You know, ‘the sky’s the limit, and we want to be up there with you,'” she told 60 Minutes.
Rogers told Whitaker that Calcea and Ne’Kiya are not “unicorns.” She added that all the girls at St. Mary’s are exceptional and are taught early on that they can do great things. For 17 years, St. Mary’s Academy has had a 100 percent graduation rate and college acceptance rate.
In chronicling the history of these major mathematical advances, 60 Minutes learned more about the “founder” of this exceptional school.
Born in 1812, Henriette Delille was a Creole nun living in New Orleans. Her father was a white Frenchman. Her mother was a free person of color, the great-granddaughter of a West African slave.
Delille, inspired by her Catholic faith and her desire to help others, taught slaves and free people of color, defying anti-literacy laws that punished those who attempted to educate non-white people.
In 1842, Delille founded the Sisters of the Holy Family, one of the oldest black Catholic brotherhoods in America.
Getty Images
In 1867, inspired by Delille’s vision for education, the sisters founded the Academy of St. Mary for the express purpose of teaching young African-American women.
More than a century later, Henriette Delille became the first American-born black person to be officially declared a saint by the Roman Catholic Church.
School principal Pamela Rogers told Whitaker that the guiding principles of St. Mary’s Academy have remained the same since its founding and that Delille would certainly recognize the school as it is today.
“We continue to move forward with his vision,” she told Whitaker.
“We teach young women to be of service, to be empowered, [and] “We teach them to grow spiritually, intellectually, to be good people and to give to each other.”
Rogers also shared with 60 Minutes that St. Mary’s Academy nearly closed completely after Hurricane Katrina devastated it in 2005. She said the school’s original site was flooded with about seven feet of water and the building had to be completely demolished.
Hurricane Katrina also impacted the lives of Ne’Kiya Jackson and Calcea Johnson.
Ne’Kiya’s mother, Neliska Jackson, was pregnant with Ne’Kiya at the time. She evacuated New Orleans before Katrina struck and gave birth to Ne’Kiya in Georgia a week later, just seven months into her pregnancy. Jackson said doctors told her the stress of the disaster was likely a factor in the premature birth.
Calcea Johnson, also born in 2005, spent the first year of her life living in a FEMA trailer on her family’s lawn after their home was flooded by the historic storm.
Calcea remembers going to St. Mary’s Elementary School in trailers while the main school building was being rebuilt.
Ultimately, it was St. Mary’s Academy that came out on top. It has a new building and expanded its enrollment from kindergarten to fifth grade. Attendance at the school is up, but it’s still far from what it was before Hurricane Katrina.
Last year, Calcea and Ne’Kiya graduated with nearly $3 million in scholarships. Ne’Kiya received a full scholarship to Xavier University in New Orleans. Calcea accepted a scholarship to study environmental engineering at Louisiana State University.
“I want to be an environmental engineer,” Calcea, now a student at LSU, told Whitaker. “I want to be able to come back and help the communities in New Orleans, because they helped me grow up.”
“Helping to combat climate change and flooding would be a huge contribution to helping New Orleans. That’s why I want to help.”
The video above was originally released on May 5, 2024. It was produced by Will Croxton and edited by Sarah Shafer Prediger.
