Highland High School in Albuquerque, New Mexico, made history when it comes to its homecoming court.

For the first time, the school voted a student with Down syndrome as queen.

Emily Money is a senior and since her freshman year, she's had a dream of becoming homecoming queen.

"I said, 'Would you like to run for the homecoming queen?' And she was super excited. She already thinks of herself as a princess queen," Emily's mother Sara Money said. "It was so heartwarming. We were at the stadium and they announced it at halftime. I prepared Emily. I said if they don't call your name, just smile and clap for the winner."

But the announcer called her name. In the video, you can see Emily jump in joy and run down the row of cheerleaders before taking a twirl and bow.

Beside her is homecoming king Diego Ayala.

"I remember the whole crowd was just standing in the air," Ayala said. "She's really fun, exciting, she's not shy to do anything... It doesn't really matter if she has Down syndrome. She's just as equal as we are."

Emily took advantage of her last name when it came to campaign for queen.

"We made $100 bills with Emily's picture on them and she passed them out to all the staff and students," Sara Cash said. "We all know it takes a village to raise a child and with a special needs child you need a special village and I've found we really have that at Highland."

"I feel like a queen and I am really happy," Emily said.

Watch the video above for the full story.

From empty store shelves to people visiting their elderly family members through glass windows, we are living history. Now, librarians are looking to document it.

“I think the pandemic affects all of us, but how people are experiencing that really varies so much from region to region, town to town, state to state," said Anna Neatrour, Digital Initiatives Librarian with the University of Utah.

Neatrour’s colleague, Jeremy Myntti, Head of Digital Library Services, says this an unprecedented time for most of us, but some have lived through similar experiences.

“If you think back to World War II or even during the 1918 flu pandemic, what people were going through is pretty similar to what we're going through now."

Over the last two months, the University of Utah has collected mostly photographs but also letters and oral history videos, documenting how the coronavirus pandemic affected us all in 2020. Many of the early submissions included photos of empty grocery store shelves and people social distancing in each other's front yards.

"People try to visit their elderly family members and in adult care facilities and not being able to do that and having to visit them through windows," said Rachel Wittmann, Digital Curation Librarian.

History students at the University of Utah are also helping the librarians document this time. More than 600 items have already been collected.

"So, once we have items submitted to us, they’re processed, they’re put into an online digital collection where anyone in the world can access to them," said Myntti.

University of Utah isn't the only one working to preserve this historical perspective. Boone County Public Library in Kentucky is also working with the public to collect items and they got the idea from another neighboring library.

In Canada, mother Natalie Long created a

free downloadable time capsule

to help children document their time in quarantine during the coronavirus. The PDF has been shared and download thousands of times, hoping to help children understand and get through this unprecedented time.

As for how long University of Utah will keep documenting, they say it could be years.

"As we move from being more locked down to opened up, things are going to shift and change. So, I think as long as everyone’s lives are disrupted, we want to still keep collecting materials and then we can document each phase of what’s happening to everyone," said Neatrour.

They’ll give future generations a digital look into what life was like in 2020.

LOS ANGELES, Calif. – For the first time in its 18-year run, “The Bachelor” has named a black leading man.

The reality show announced Friday that 28-year-old Matt James will star as the bachelor for the 25^th season.

Good Morning America reports that James was originally cast as a suitor on Clare Crawley’s upcoming season of “The Bachelorette,” which has been delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

ABC hopes to air Crawley’s season of “The Bachelorette” this fall, with James making his debut on “The Bachelor” afterwards in 2021.

GMA says James is a real estate broker, entrepreneur and community organization founder. The North Carolina native graduated from Wake Forest University, where he majored in economics and played football.

James also seems to be friends with former contestants Hannah Brown and Tyler Cameron, who both appear on his Instagram page.

The casting announcement comes after years of fans demanding diversity and just days after the franchise’s first black bachelorette, Rachel Lindsay, said she would cut ties with the show if a black bachelor was not cast, Variety reports.

Florida is known by many for its beaches. But in politics, it sometimes is known for being the butt of a joke.

With many counties in Florida reporting record number of vote-by-mail requests, some are wondering will more controversy emerge in 2020? Tuesday's primary may provide clues.

TUESDAY'S PRIMARY

While Tuesday's primary does not involve presidential politics in Florida, a number of races impacting the state legislature, Congress and local governments are taking place.

HISTORY OF ISSUES

Florida's issues with elections goes all the way back to 1876. The presidential election was still undecided with Florida being unsure how to award its 4 Electoral College votes.

Florida wasn't alone. South Carolina and Louisiana were also unsure.

As a result, Congress had to step in and resolve the issue with Rutherford B. Hayes eventually becoming President.

Most Americans know Florida because of the issues in 2000. With another presidential election hanging in the balance, Al Gore and George W. Bush battled for votes during a 36-day recount.

Palm Beach County's butterfly ballot, with confusing placement of names for some voters, likely resulted in 2,800 votes for Pat Buchanan instead of Gore.

"Hanging Chads" in the state became a household phrase nationwide to describe ballots with paper fragments still hanging from them. Ballots that year were hole punch style for many voters.

Like in 2000 and 2016, Florida has long been an important state for nominees to win. It has helped choose the winning presidential candidate every election since 1992.

RECENT ISSUES

Issues in Florida's Elections have continued in recent years. In Broward County, nearly 1,000 uncounted ballots were found in a warehouse in 2012. In 2018, 22 ballots were counted that were supposed to be rejected.

THIS YEAR

Election officials have recommitted themselves to making sure Florida controversy is limited this year. However, time will tell. Stay tuned.

PHILADELPHIA, Pa. — From an elaborate ceremonial wedding dress to the uniform of a player for the NFL, clothing can tell the story of a person as well as a time and place.

“It says a great deal about what's happening at the moment,” said Sarah Linn, co-curator of The Stories We Wear, a new exhibit at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia.

Inside the exhibit, hundreds of items stretching back more than 2,500 years show not just what people wore, but what they experienced at the time.

“It says so much about the culture in which they're living, about their time period,” Linn said.

Like these Samurai items used during a children’s celebration.

Some belonged to a California family who worked hard to keep them even as they were sent to a Japanese internment camp during World War II.

“So, it tells this wonderful story both about Children’s Day and about the importance of Samurai and that history, but it also tells this really important story about American history and how we hold on to our history,” Linn said.

There’s also this dress on display, which was sewn during the Great Depression.

An elastic waistband and a hem that could be raised and lowered allowed the dress to be shared by multiple women in a family.

“This was in the Depression, when money might be a little bit tight, and the idea of a well-made garment needing to fit multiple members of the family might make sense,” Linn said.

There’s the gown of an opera star worn by Marian Anderson and a dress fit for a princess, like the one which belonged to Grace Kelly.

There is also an ensemble fit for a queen—a drag queen, that is.

“This one embodies so many parts of performance,” Linn said. “Drag itself is performance.”

However, the museum wanted everyone to get involved.

Using the #storieswewear hashtag, people anywhere can share pictures of what they wear and the stories behind it, as some current COVID-era nurses did, which then can appear on interactive monitors in the exhibit if selected.

“Here is an opportunity for people to share heirlooms and keepsakes that have been passed down through their families, that are important to them,” Linn said.

However, it’s not just about sharing what you wear on your skin, but what your skin might be wearing, too. Tattoos are also included in the exhibit.

“We wanted to talk about permanent forms of adornment,” Linn said. “We tend to get tattoos that embody something of our personal identity, and so we wanted people to share their stories about their tattoos.”

The exhibit runs at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia through mid-June. It can also be seen on the museum’s website, which you can access by clicking here.

A teacher in Alabama presented photographs of the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol without commentary and asked students to write poems in reflection. A Minnesota instructor fielded comparisons to the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing. And a civics educator in Connecticut urged her rattled students to work toward making the country better.

Social studies teachers nationwide set aside lesson plans this week to help young people make sense of the scenes of the violent siege in Washington by supporters of President Donald Trump.

Approaches varied, with some teachers deliberately holding off on historical comparisons with the events so fresh. Many trod cautiously in light of varied political viewpoints in their classrooms and communities.

But educators universally described efforts to hear out students’ fears and concerns and instill a sense of history and even hopefulness in a school year shaped by the nation’s reckoning over racial injustice, the coronavirus pandemic and the constraints of distance learning.

“In almost every single one of my classes, the students brought it up before I even could,” said Karley Reising, a social studies teacher at Robert E. Fitch High School in Groton, Connecticut. “And especially my seniors were really struggling with what this meant about the future of our country in a way that was pretty heartbreaking.”

She and others said they tried to focus on the importance of engagement and to push back against the creeping sense that violence is the inevitable end to political division.

“This was one of the most important days as a teacher, not even just a history teacher,” Michael Neagle said after wrapping up with his students at Lowell High School in Massachusetts the day after the siege. “We don’t want kids to tune out and just say, ‘Well, this is how it is. Nobody gets along. Politics.’ That voter apathy is so dangerous.”

After watching events unfold on television, the world history and civics teacher stayed up most of the night exchanging emails with his department chair, planning out lessons around what was unfolding.

“I don’t have many nights where I’m up til 3 o’clock in the morning with curriculum,” Neagle said, “but we have to take advantage of it.”

South St. Paul, Minnesota, teacher Mark Westpfahl set aside his planned lesson on state treaties and instead grabbed the morning newspapers with their “Insurrection” headlines to use as visual aides to teach his sixth grade students, who are learning remotely. Just miles from the fiery clashes ignited by Floyd’s death, there were questions from his students about the police response that will carry into lessons next week.

“That’s the connection that we’re going to bring in on Monday, is how do these two events correlate with each other? What was the response like? What was the media presence like?” he said.

As he taught his 10- and 11-year-old students over video, three or four parents made their way into view on his screen but didn’t interrupt.

In such a fraught political climate, Westpfahl said, “you are wondering, are you listening because you’re finding this fascinating and interesting, or are you listening because you want to question everything that I’m saying or doing?”

In deeply conservative Alabama, 10th-grade teacher Blake Busbin said he, too, considered how his presentation and language could be perceived by students and the community and said he is “very purposeful with the language I use, choosing what words to utilize.”

Busbin, a teacher at Auburn High School, made a point to let students watch the chaos unfold on TV. He was a high school senior on 9/11 and the school principal ordered a media blackout, which he felt cost him an opportunity to watch history in the making.

The day after the Capitol siege, he rose before dawn and gathered 25 photographs that he showed for 10 to 15 seconds each without saying anything, then asked students to write poems. He wanted it to be day a of reflection.

“My strategy, as I told my students, I like to consider myself kind of like a grill master," he said. "Before you put the meat on the grill, it needs to marinate for a while.”

The students submitted the poems anonymously, and they weren’t read in class. Busbin said they helped him understand students’ frame of mind and will help guide future instruction.

The poems, he said, show a desire for a more harmonious government, a more bipartisan approach and a belief that things can get better.

“It’s been a year of hurt. Certainly having student family members who have passed away, having students who were ill," he said. “My fear is that there is that we’ve almost become numb to the hurt that we felt throughout this year.”

The poems, Busbin said, show a desire for a more harmonious government, a bipartisan approach and a belief that things can get better.

In David McMullen's classroom at Great Path Academy in Manchester, Connecticut, politics emerged when a student addressed unfounded claims that it was a false flag operation. Another student stepped in and said even if that were the case, the president and supporters had encouraged the mob nonetheless.

“Today was just to kind of soak in the events and talk about them and write some stuff down, because, as I tell my students, they are the future’s primary sources,” he said.

McMullen and other teachers also heard out students who were deeply affected by the photographs of Confederate flags carried through the halls of Capitol and who saw a double standard in the heavier response by police to Black Lives Matter protests.

Reising said the conversation among her students was strained by their hybrid learning model, and because some have not even met face to face. But she tried to end the discussion on a hopeful note.

“I just turn it into, ‘Hopefully for you and maybe for others in our country, this will be the thing that lights the fire on what it means to be an active, engaged citizen. And if you didn’t like what you saw, then what steps can you take to make sure this doesn’t happen again?’”

New York teacher Conor Murphy thought back to 9/11, when he was in an American history class and watched the second plane hit the World Trade Center.

“One of the challenges is to appropriately signify the gravity,” Murphy said, recalling a similar challenge a year ago while teaching participation in government at West Genesee High School in Camillus during Trump’s impeachment trial.

“But,” he said, “I’ve never really had to teach anything quite so, in my opinion, profound.”

AUSTIN, Texas -- Senate Bill 1 in Texas was signed into law by Governor Abbott on Tuesday. It was authored by Texas Republican State Senator Bryan Hughes.

“Everyone needs to know their vote is gonna count and be counted accurately," Sen. Hughes said. "Our goal is to make it easy to vote, and hard to cheat.”

According to Sen. Hughes, the law expands and standardizes in-person voting, requires an online portal to correct ballot mistakes and cracks down on people accused of misleading voters.

“Many of them in minority communities, many of them with limited English proficiency who have a hard time, sometimes with the voting process, they're the ones being taken advantage of being coerced, having their votes stolen," Sen. Hughes said. "But we're going to stand up for them.”

Republicans call it the voting integrity bill. Those opposed deem it a voting restriction bill, like Sophia Lin Lakin, the deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union Voting Rights Project.

“You have more and more states emboldened to ultimately enact the voter suppression bills that are being introduced across legislatures across the country," Lakin said. "We have more than 400 anti-voter bills that have been introduced just this past cycle, and it's a full-scale assault on voting rights in response to record levels of turnout that we saw in the 2020 Presidential Election.”

Lakin says SB 1 in Texas restricts voters by taking away drive-through voting and mail-in ballots from populations that disproportionately used those methods this past election.

“States are going after Black and brown voters by targeting the kinds of ways and the tools that Black and brown voters are using in order to make their voices heard," Lakin said. "So, you see a tax on mail voting, for example, in Texas and in many other places as well.”

In order to vote by mail in Texas, Sen. Hughes says you need to be 65 or over, have a disability, or be out of the country to vote by mail.

"We like voting in person,” Sen. Hughes said.

Sen. Hughes says voting in person limits the potential for fraud. However, Alex Keyssar, Stirling Professor of History and Social Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, says there is extremely little voting fraud in the United States.

“These laws do not seem designed to really protect any compelling state interest in preventing fraud. They seem designed to make it harder for certain people to vote,“ Keyssar said. "We have significant populations that are known to vote Democratic. I mean, the African-American population votes overwhelmingly Democratic, poor people vote overwhelmingly Democratic. So if you can keep those people from voting, that's going to benefit the Republican Party.”

He says what you do see in our voting history, are rules that made it more difficult for certain populations to vote.

“You know, New York State, for example, passed an English language literacy requirement to vote in the early 1920s," Keyssar said. "And a lot of states passed laws, for example, that you had to bring your citizenship papers. They did not pass laws that say you can't vote because you're Black, because that would have been clearly unconstitutional, so they passed laws that made it difficult to vote if you were Black.”

Keyssar says the federal government tends to step in when it becomes clear that when left to their own devices, states will be discriminatory.

“My hope is that there will be a federal response here that we will see some federal action and in and as a result, we'll have many of the tools that we've had before and restored to their full robustness and that will bring a much more, much more close to closer to a democracy in which every person who is eligible to vote is able to vote without discrimination, without unnecessary obstacles, without being targeted,” Lakin said.

For Texas Republicans, the law which goes into effect next election cycle is a big success. Sen. Hughes says he wants to protect everyone’s vote.

“When more people show up, we all win,” Sen. Hughes said.

CHICAGO — Last week marked what would have been Emmett Till’s 80^th birthday had he not been killed by a group of white men in Mississippi in 1955.

The 14-year-old Black teen was murdered after being accused of whistling at a white woman at a grocery store. The crime shocked the senses and shined a spotlight on the racial violence against Black people in the Jim Crow south.

The church where his funeral service was held has long been an important part of Black history, and more than six decades later, there are renewed efforts to preserve the church that changed the civil rights movement.

“So, the balcony was like a square, so it went from the pulpit. There was a choir stand all the way around,” explained Sharon Roberts.

Roberts grew up in the south side of Chicago church.

“This is kind of where the church started. My great grandfather built this," she said.

When her great grandfather built the Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ, it was the first of its kind in the Midwest and intended to be a place to heal.

“He came here to start Robert’s Temple, a holiness church. It wasn't heard of back then and it was needed for what they called a wicked city here in Chicago,” said Roberts, who is now the church secretary and in charge with preservation efforts.

The halls are adorned with images of decades past.

But it was the brutal murder of Emmett Till, a Black teenager, in Mississippi in 1955 that thrust this house of God into the history books.

“The unfortunate death of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy who was accused of whistling at a white woman down in Mississippi, visiting his family and friends down there, was taken in the middle of the night by the husband and friends of this woman," Roberts recalled.

The men were charged with viciously beating the teen, lynching him, and tying him to a cotton gin before throwing his body into a river.

“So, right here, back when there were about 40 stairs, a staircase to come from downstairs up. And that's where his casket was brought up and laid here,” said Roberts.

His mother, a member of Roberts Temple, brought him back to Chicago for the funeral. The service drew some 50,0000 visitors. It was a galvanizing moment.

“His mother was very, very certain that she wanted an open casket so the world could see what had happened to her son.”

The church was recently added to America’s 11 most endangered historic places list.

So, last month when the National Trust for Historic Preservation announced more than $3 million in grants to 40 sites and organizations through its African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, Roberts Temple church was at the top of the list.

“Our top awardee this year is Robert's Temple,” said Brent Leggs, executive director of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund at the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Leggs says the grant was an important opportunity to elevate the many ways that Black women have contributed to civil rights.

“Emmett Till's mother in 1955, when she made the decision to have an open-casket funeral that not only showcased and demonstrated her character, her self-determination, her activism, but it was a catalytic moment in the American civil rights movement,” Roberts said.

To restore the building and reimagine its use, Roberts says they will take the building back in time.

“This is just, it's unbelievable because this will be the first phase of preserving a historic place. So, we'll start there. And then our goal is to transform, renovate, restore the church back to 1955,” said Roberts.

Beyond restoring the church to what it looked like during Emmett Till’s funeral, they hope to gain national landmark status as well.

“We're just happy to still be here for the community. We're small in number, very small membership, but we're mighty and we plan to be here forever," Roberts said.

It’s an opportunity to preserve the past for the future.

CARLISLE, Pa. — The old photos show young faces; all of them are Native American children. They are the children of Carlisle.

“They would cut their hair immediately,” said Susan Rose, a sociology professor and author of a book about the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. “They weren't allowed to speak their own languages when they came here. They would take off their clothing and end up in military garb.”

Starting in 1879, over the course of four decades, nearly 8,000 Native American children ended up at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

It was the first off-reservation boarding school in the country and set the standard for hundreds of others that would follow.

Some of the students there were thousands of miles away from their homes.

“That's about as separated as you can be,” said Jim Gerencser, an archivist at nearby Dickinson College. “The purpose of the Carlisle Indian School was to turn Native American children and young adults into white, Victorian-era children of America.”

It was a philosophy pioneered by the school’s founder, former U.S. Army General Richard Henry Pratt. His image remains engraved on the site of the former school, which is now home to the U.S. Army Barracks in Carlisle. Back in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, though, the school was well-known.

“Carlisle is in the public eye because Pratt is operating his own kind of propaganda machine,” Gerencser said. “So, you see articles about Carlisle in the popular press all the time.”

Eight years ago, Gerencser and a team launched a massive undertaking: the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center.

“The idea for the project was to digitize all of the known remaining records related to the Carlisle Indian School, and all the students who were sent there, and to make those documents easily discoverable and accessible online,” he said.

They found that the students came from more than 100 Native American tribes, from Florida to Alaska and nearly every state in between.

Some of the buildings of the former Carlisle Indian School now make up the U.S. Army barracks and are still in use today, like a gymnasium, which was built by the very Native American students who were forced to attend the school.

One of the school’s earliest students was Robbie Paul’s grandfather. He was 10 years old at the time.

“When he arrived at Carlisle, he had his Nez Perce name: Black Raven,” she said. “And while he was there, Pratt changed his name to Jesse Paul, and that's how we have the Paul family name.”

The experience for her grandfather and others wasn’t pleasant. Children were punished if they spoke their native language. Yet, Robbie Paul’s grandfather held on.

“Even though he's there eight years at Carlisle, where you're punished for speaking the language, somehow he hangs on to his language because he still speaks Nez Perce eight years later and comes back home to the reservation,” Paul said.

Not all the students came home. At least 235 children died at the Carlisle School.

“In some communities, those stories are really told, and in other communities, there's been a great silence,” said Susan Rose, co-author of Carlisle Indian Industrial School: Indigenous Histories, Memories, and Reclamations. “This isn't just Native American, American Indian history. It's part of our history.”

From the 1870s until the 1960s, there were more than 350 taxpayer-funded, and often times church-run, Native American boarding schools. The exact numbers of how many students attended those schools are hard to come by, but estimates range in the hundreds of thousands. Many experienced physical, sexual and emotional abuse, according to the National Native American Boarding School Coalition.

How many died within the entire Native American boarding school system across the country remains a big question. Now, there’s a formal effort to get to the bottom of it.

U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, whose department oversees the Bureau of Indian Affairs, is the first-ever Native American cabinet member.

Her grandfather also attended the Carlisle School and she recently ordered an investigation into the Native American boarding school system.

“It was a really complicated sort of philosophy and an experiment that now many would definitely consider as genocide,” Rose said.

The investigation’s goal is to get an accounting of what the children experienced, how many died at the schools and how many may still be buried in unmarked graves at the sites.

Recently, hundreds of unmarked graves of First Nations children were found at two schools in Canada, which had a similar boarding school system for Native children.

Just this month, the U.S. Army brought in a forensic team to disinter 10 Carlisle students buried in marked graves and returned them to their Native communities in Alaska and South Dakota. Those children had been previously buried in a cemetery elsewhere at the school, which was later moved to the current site in the 1920s.

“We looked at the cemetery and we looked at an area where the original cemetery was,” said Dr. Michael “Sonny” Trimble, an archaeologist with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers archaeologist. “Most of the original cemetery is beneath buildings now. You know, time has moved on. We found no signatures.”

Time hasn’t moved on for everyone, though. Robbie Paul thinks about her grandfather often and says trauma like that can be felt through the generations.

“This is truth-telling,” she said. “It is acknowledging the harm, transforming history, to begin repatriation, before we can start to reconcile and reconciliation.”

It’s a reconciliation that faces a long road ahead in the search for answers.

Successfully getting humans into space and back is risky business. However, it was made possible less than a century ago thanks to help from some extraordinary Black women known as ‘Hidden Figures’.

“My name is Duchess Harris and I’m the co-author of a book called ‘Hidden Human Computers: The Black Women of NASA’ and my grandmother was Miriam Daniel Mann and she was one of the first hidden human computers at NASA," Harris said.

Harris, and American studies professor, has dedicated a lot of time to researching the legacy of her grandmother.

“The Hidden Figures were Black women who were human computers at NASA," Harris said. "And human computers were women who checked the math of engineers who were men and this was because women weren’t allowed to become engineers until the mid-1960s."

They were called human computers because this was before IBM mainframe computers. Acting NASA chief historian Brian Odom says their calculations were essential to engineers.

“When they’d get all this data back from a test – wind tunnel testing, any type of testing like that, plotting trajectories – it was the job of those women to kind of crunch the numbers, to do the math,” Odom said.

Harris says her grandmother had the opportunity to go to college, which was a big deal considering she was born only 40 years after slavery was abolished. However, women of color like her first broke into the space industry out of necessity.

“When World War II broke out, NASA needed Black women to become computers because there weren’t enough educated white women to fill up the spots that were needed because the men were deployed because of the war,” Harris said.

That brought Mann into the highest-paying job a Black woman could get at the time.

“She was in the entering class in 1943 of 11 Black women who passed the Civil Service Exam," Harris said. "And so she went off to work with an 8-year-old, a 7-year-old and a 6-year-old, and the 7-year-old was my mom.”

Harris says her grandmother started the job shortly after President Franklin D. Roosevelt desegregated federal jobs, but not the physical workspace itself. So the Black women were sectioned off to the west side where there were ‘colored’ signs to label things like the restroom. Mann did not like those signs.

“They were actually on the wall, you could slide them off, and she’d put them in her purse and then she’d bring them home and my mother and my uncles would laugh about how their parents would fight about it because my grandfather thought of course she’d get in trouble, she’d get fired and he didn’t want her to lose the income,” Harris said.

More than 70 years later, Harris and Odom says it’s extremely important to recognize the contributions of these women.

“Our job at NASA is to inspire," Odom said. "To inspire people to enter into these very hard fields, difficult fields from a training standpoint, difficult from a professional standpoint, and to reach into underserviced, underrepresented groups. Females are unfortunately still part of that. African Americans definitely, African American females.”

“If people don’t know what women have done before them, sometimes young boys don’t think of women as authority figures and young girls don’t think that they can aspire for these positions,” Harris said.

Odom says without these hidden figures, we likely wouldn’t be where we are today.

“You’ve got to have a diversity of ideas if you want to do the hard things of space exploration and scientific discovery at that level. It takes everyone and it take that intermingling of ideas from multiple perspectives,” Odom said.

WALLACE, La. — Just inside the levee holding back the mighty Mississippi River, there is a quiet stillness in the land and a story that is still unfolding after more than two and a half centuries.

The place is known as the Whitney Plantation, which dates back to 1752.

“We just have a lot to contend with,” said Joy Banner. “When we think about plantations, most people erroneously use the word ‘plantation’ to refer to the ‘Big House’ and the ‘Big House’ only.”

Not there, though: the ‘Big House’ is not the main attraction.

That’s by design.

“This interpretation is based around the life, labor and the culture of the enslaved people,” she said.

Joy Banner’s ancestors once worked in the surrounding fields as slaves. She now works for the nonprofit foundation that runs the Whitney Plantation.

“There is so much trauma and so much pressure on Black people to just push it on the side and move forward: ‘Don’t make anyone uncomfortable with it,’” she said. “So, I’ll be honest, I’m unpacking my feelings about the cabins, the plantations, every single day.

Seven years after opening to the public, the Whitney remains one of the only plantations in the country whose entire focus centers on the people who were enslaved there.

“If we are presenting true history, then I don't see there being any other choice, but to center it around enslaved people,” Banner said.

Inside a church on-site, visitors are greeted by life-like statues known as the "Children of Whitney."

“In the face of everything that is happening to them, they drew from their faith,” Banner said, as she looked around the church and at the statues. “They just have a presence and they have a humanness – a humanity about them – that really makes you feel like you’re in company with them.”

There are no shoes on the feet of the children's statues. Their clothes are threadbare.

“It’s a reminder that the system of slavery impacted children as well,” she said.

Even after Juneteenth and news of their emancipation, not everyone on the plantation could afford to leave. Many stayed and worked the land under a new system, not slavery in name, but difficult to get out from under.

“In the case of Whitney, there's a plantation store. And so, all of their staples, all of their groceries, items that they need, are purchased from the store, which is then deducted from their wages. So, then you have a system of debt that's created and perpetuated,” Banner said. “And so you have generations of people that stay on the plantation and work on the plantation.”

People worked the land there well into the late 20^th century.

“Until the 1970s,” Banner said. “The cabins that we have here on-site, we have two original cabins, there were people that were living in them until the mid-1970s.”

The cabins are a stark reminder of slavery and have been moved to be located much closer to the "Big House" than they were in the past.

“Sometimes, I’m in this desensitized mode, just to go about my day,” Banner said, “and then there’s other days where I just walk by the cabin and I’m just like, ‘People lived here. Like, my ancestors lived here.”

It’s also emotional: a place of uncertainty and pain in the past that is still felt today.

“Think of the trauma – it may be a person that has just been separated from their family. Because that person that you welcome into your family unit, and that you love as part of your family, he could be sold tomorrow,” Banner said, as she held back tears. “So, when people love someone else in a community, that’s an act of resistance, to stay human and to stay connected with each other.”

For the 100,000 people who visit each year, she hopes their message about what plantations were really like historically helps them think about what racism looks like today.

“I would also encourage people to understand how does racism take shape and form in their own communities,” Banner said, “and what is it that we can do to learn more or to help more.”

It’s a message they hope will resonate throughout the land.