“My grandfather was a professor at [the private Hampton, Virginia,-based black university] Hampton University, so that’s where my grandmother lived during World War II,” said Harris, a married mother of three. “NASA had hired white women to be human computers, and there weren’t enough to work on the project they were doing. So they went over to Hampton to see if there were enough black women who could do math, and my grandmother had a chemistry degree from Talladega College [in Alabama], even though she had been born in 1907.

“My grandmother died in ’67, before we got to the moon. I was born in ’69, the year it happened, and I was named after her. So I heard the stories my entire life, but I didn’t really understand the significance of what she’d done until I went to college. I was influenced by the courage that she had to live out the daily practices that you need to have to be a career woman and a wife and mother and to hold together a black family and to be successful in the midst of racism and sexism.”

Read the full article here:
https://www.minnpost.com/arts-culture/2016/09/duchess-harris-shares-grandmothers-story-upcoming-hidden-human-computers-black-