60 Minutes - 09/01/2024: Secretary of Commerce, On British Soil, St. Mary’s

Episode Date: September 2, 2024

Since taking office as the U.S. Secretary of Commerce under the Biden administration, Gina Raimondo has turned the second-tier agency into a center of national security, manufacturing, and job creation. Correspondent Lesley Stahl meets Raimondo - including in her home state of Rhode Island, where she previously served as governor - to talk about the international “chip war” after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the escalating trade tensions with China over U.S. restrictions on the sale of leading-edge semiconductors and U.S. jobs hanging in the balance. Raimondo also shares the path that brought her to lead President Joe Biden’s Department of Commerce. Less than 100 miles from Britain’s mainland lie the Channel Islands, British Crown dependencies, with a fraught and hotly debated history. 60 Minutes contributor Holly Williams visits the islands that were occupied by Germany for five years during World War II and where the Nazis operated two concentration camps. Williams speaks with historians, British government officials and longtime residents to find out what really happened. For 17 years, St. Mary’s has had a 100% graduation rate and a 100% college acceptance rate. The all-girls private school has no entry tests, just high expectations and strict rules. Two of the high school seniors solved a mathematical puzzle that was thought to be impossible for 2,000 years. Bill Whitaker reports. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo is a fast-rising star in the Democratic Party, enforcing large parts of our tough China trade policy while working to create millions of new jobs here in the U.S. We allowed manufacturing in this country to wither on the vine in search of cheaper labour in Asia, cheaper capital in Asia, and here we are. It's pretty well hidden, isn't it? Yeah, well, if you didn't know how to get here, you wouldn't easily stumble across it.

On the windswept island of Alderney, the Nazis operated concentration camps on British soil. Decades later, the British government is investigating how many people were killed here. Why might the British government have tried to cover up what happened on the Channel Islands? So, are you math geniuses? Not at all. How did these high school students prove an ancient mathematical equation that was thought

to be impossible for 2,000 years? We start with just a regular right triangle, where the angle in the corner is 90 degrees. Then we start creating similar but smaller right triangles, and then it continues for infinity. Am I going a little too? You've been beyond me since the beginning. Oh.

I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Cec Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Cecilia Vega. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes.

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Terms and conditions apply. Visit bmo.com slash theiporter to learn more. Meet Tim's new Oreo mocha ice caps with Oreo in every sip. Perfect for listening to the A-side or B-side or bull-side. Order yours on the Tim's app today at participating restaurants in Canada for a limited time. What does the Secretary of Commerce do? Until now, mainly promote U.S. businesses abroad. It had not been a high-profile job till Gina Raimondo turned the second-tier agency

into a center of job creation, manufacturing, and national security. Once the governor of Rhode Island, Raimondo, at 53, seems to have come out of nowhere to become a rising star of the Democratic Party and of the Biden administration. As Commerce Secretary, she's running new projects that, as we first reported in April, could touch the lives of every American.

And she's helping lead the expanding Cold War with China and confront Russia's aggression in Ukraine. The battlefield for both those conflicts is technology. If you think about national security today, in 2024, it's not just tanks and missiles. It's technology. It's semiconductors. It's AI. It's drones. And the Commerce Department is at the red-hot center of technology. And at the red-hot center, a global chip war that ramped up, says Gina Raimondo, when Russia invaded Ukraine.

The Commerce Department stopped all semiconductor chips from being sold to Russia. Every drone, every missile, every tank has semiconductors in them. And, you know, Leslie, you know we're being effective because shortly after we started that work, we heard stories of the Russians taking semiconductors out of refrigerators, out of dishwashers, out of breast pumps, getting the chips to put them into their military equipment. However, the Russians are now working their way around this. They are. Successfully, and they're doing better in the war

probably because of this. You are right in what you say. But, she says, it's absolutely the case that our export controls have hurt their ability to conduct the war, made it harder, and we are enforcing this every minute of every day, doing everything we can. These are some of the enforcers. We should talk about our controls on Russia. Raimondo's team at Commerce that monitors and polices the ban on any company in the world from selling products with American chips in them to Russia. But not just Russia. I've made sure that the most advanced American technologies can't be used in China.

The Chinese warn that these export controls could trigger an escalating trade war. Trade with China accounts for 750,000 U.S. jobs. And if trade ends, we lose our jobs. We want to trade with China on the vast majority of goods and services. But on those technologies that affect our national security, no. Those advanced chips are in consumer goods. Banks use them. Hospitals. This is going toward products that are made for civilian use. Yeah, well, they also go into nuclear weapons, surveillance systems, and we know they want

these chips and our sophisticated technology to advance their military. Her toughness has made her a target in China, where fake ads have her promoting the new Chinese-made smartphone. Last year, the government in Beijing hacked her email. And when she was in China, on a trip, ironically, to improve relations, the tech company Huawei introduced that new smartphone with an advanced Chinese-made chip. It was kind of in your face, as if to say, look at the chip that we have. And it was a pretty good high-level chip. Well, I have their attention, clearly. And they've gotten yours.

Well, what it tells me is the export controls are working because that chip is not nearly as good. It's years behind what we have in the United States. We have the most sophisticated semiconductors in the world. China doesn't. We've out-innovated China. Well, we, you mean Taiwan. Fair. While American tech companies design the world's most advanced chips, none are actually made in the U.S. Ninety percent of them come from Taiwan, and they are key to the future of U.S. military weaponry. And China, from time to time, threatens, you know, the wolf, to invade Taiwan.

And some people say the whole reason is to get their hands on those chips. That's a problem. It's a risk. It makes us vulnerable. The problem of our outsourcing production goes way beyond high tech, with millions of American workers having lost their jobs that went overseas, something Raimondo knows firsthand, growing up as the youngest child in an Italian-American family in Rhode Island. This is the old Bulova watch factory

where my dad worked for almost 30 years. Her dad lost his job when Bulova abandoned the factory in 1983 and moved its operations to China. It's hard for you to imagine it now as you look around here, but this was a, you know, a bustling place. You know, they had a thousand people working here, food trucks on the sidewalk, an electroplating shop there, a tool and die shop there, and now this is what you have. And how old were you? I was in like sixth grade, but I saw the toll it took on my dad and my family. And that influenced her career choices, from when she studied economics and played rugby at Harvard.

So this is my office. To when she left a high-paying job as a venture capitalist to run for public office in Rhode Island. This was the day that I was sworn in as state treasurer, and those were my parents. That was my dad. That's your dad? Super proud of me. The man who worked at Bulova? The man who worked at Bulova,

the man who taught me about manufacturing, taught me that a job is about your pride, ability to take care of your family, not just a paycheck. Married with two children, Raimondo, a Rhodes Scholar and Yale Law School graduate, was elected the state's first female governor in 2014 as a moderate, pro-business Democrat. Liberals in your party, this is a quote, look upon you as a sellout to big business. I think that's ridiculous.

I hold businesses accountable as much as anyone. When I tell them they can't sell their semiconductors to China, they don't love that, but I do that. In late 2020, President-elect Joe Biden called her about leading the Commerce Department, which till then managed without much fanfare or headlines a mishmash of agencies and assignments ranging from monitoring the weather to measuring the level of contaminants in household dust. So one day President-elect Biden calls you and said, what about being Commerce Secretary? And you heard that and thought...

GINA MCCARTHY- Truthfully, initially I thought, what does a Commerce Secretary do? AMY GOODMAN- Yeah. GINA MCCARTHY- And then the president-elect said to me, come, I want you to work with me to help rebuild American manufacturing. And I called my brother, my big brother, and he said, Gina, Dad would be so proud. You got to do it. You got to do it. And that was it. Once at Commerce, she began to lean on Congress. This is just good business. To fund her new programs with $100 billion, including $50 billion for the bipartisan CHIPS Act that she is now

dispensing to reduce America's reliance on Taiwan. It's a huge day for the entire country. In March, in Arizona, she announced her first award for making leading-edge chips in the U.S. to Intel. We are announcing our intention to invest $8.5 billion in Intel, America's champion semiconductor company. Intel intends to construct and modernize facilities in Arizona, New Mexico, Oregon, and Ohio. She's made other big awards totaling more than $20 billion, including one to Taiwan-based TSMC and another to the South Korean company Samsung to make the world's most

advanced chips in Arizona and Texas. Raimondo is also spreading her largesse elsewhere in the country with another huge initiative, the Internet for All program. We went with her to a corning factory in North Carolina, the world's largest manufacturer of fiber optic cable. You're looking at fiber on these spools, all different colors. What's inside of there is actually one of the 10 million miles of new cable that's needed to connect the 24 million Americans living mostly in rural America who don't have access to high-speed Internet. And under prodding by Raimondo, he's investing Corning's own capital to do it.

We've invested another half billion dollars and doubled our footprint for the U.S. When you're spending all this money to connect, you know, small numbers of people who live miles away, the expense almost doesn't make sense. It does make sense. The internet is no longer a luxury. You need it to see the doctor, to go to school, to do your business, to pay your bills, to sign up for, you know, Social Security. Everyone has electricity in this country. Everyone ought to have the Internet. Together, she says, the Internet for All and the CHIPS Act initiatives will create about a half million jobs by 2030. But Wall Street is skeptical. Intel, for example, recently reported $7 billion in operating losses.

When you go to pick these different companies to give them money to, it's social industrial policy, something, you know, we gave up because it was shown the private industry does a better job picking. You're smiling. Well, do they? Because in the case of semiconductors, the market didn't get it right. How did we lose this? We allowed manufacturing in this country to wither on the vine in search of cheaper labor in Asia, cheaper capital in Asia,

and here we are. We just pursued profit over national security. There are strings attached to these grants. They have to provide daycare. You want them to have a diverse workforce. Be union workers? That is not social policy, Leslie. Sounds like it. It's math. This is pure math. You won't have enough workers to do the job unless you figure out how to get women working in the facilities. But on that point, if they need women and women need daycare,

that's a decision for the company to make. Why mandate it if it's what they need? It's not mandated. To be clear, these are not mandates. But it's written in there. It is written, but you know what's funny? I never hear complaints about this from the companies. The only complaints I have are from politicians.

In her nearly four years in Washington, Raimondo has elevated the Commerce Department and its secretary into a high-profile player. China wakes up every day figuring out how to get around our regulations. We've got to wake up every day that much more relentless and aggressive. So I bring it every day. So here comes the inevitable, obvious question that you know is coming your way.

You are on a list of future presidential candidates. Does that sound good to you? Is it appetizing? What sounds good to me is being the best Commerce Secretary there's ever been. One qualification for high office is being able to duck a question like that. Or a question about what role she might play in the next administration should Kamala Harris win the White House. Secretary Raimondo isn't saying, but rumor has it she'd be interested

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Service fees, exclusions and terms apply. Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver. Now Holly Williams on assignment for 60 minutes. The names Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald are infamous as the scene of atrocities, concentration camps run by Adolf Hitler's notorious SS. But what you may be surprised to learn, as we were, is that two Nazi concentration camps were established on British soil in the Channel Islands, around 80 miles from the British mainland. The islands lie just off the coast of France, became possessions of the English crown around

a thousand years ago, and were occupied by Germany for nearly five years during World War II. We visited what remains of the camps this past winter, just before the British government completed a review of the death toll there, with findings that are hotly disputed. It's pretty well hidden, isn't it? Yeah, well, if you didn't know how to get here, you wouldn't easily stumble across it. And this was the sort of back entrance.

There's not much left of the Third Reich's Lager Silt concentration camp. On the windswept island of Alderney, about three miles long and one and a half wide, nature is gradually swallowing up its crumbling concrete walls. And the camps up here. These take you straight into the camp. Marcus Roberts is an Oxford-educated amateur historian who runs heritage tours. He's spent years researching this forgotten chapter

in British history. So, undoubtedly, if you wanted to put a pin on the map, you could say this is where the Holocaust happened on British sovereign territory. When Germany invaded France in 1940, the British government calculated that the Channel Islands had no strategic value and gave them up without a fight. Nearly all of the residents of Aldenay decided to evacuate before the German

troops arrived. On the empty island, the Germans set up two concentration camps as well as labour camps. They brought in prisoners of war and forced labourers to build giant fortifications that still survive today, part of Hitler's Atlantic Wall to protect against Allied attack. A minority of them were Jewish. Others were from Russia, Ukraine, Poland and Spain. I understand this was called the Tunnel of Death. Yes, it was notorious in the memory of prisoners. On two occasions, they were forced to cram in here

in an apparent rehearsal for their own death. After the war, in 1945, the British military investigated the camps and put the death toll on Alderney in the low hundreds. Some of those who lost their lives were buried under this plot of land. But Marcus Roberts and others argue that more than 10,000 must have died on the island based on controversial calculations about the size of the labour force needed to build the fortifications. Roberts told us it's because he's Jewish that he's determined to count all of the dead. There's the Jewish instinct to, you know, leave no-one behind.

You're trying to make sure that all the Jewish dead are counted? Remembered. If you don't remember a life, it's as if they never lived at all. Most academics dispute Roberts' estimate of the death toll. But partly as a result of those disagreements, last year the British government as a result of those disagreements, last year the British government appointed a team of researchers to comb through archives across Europe and more accurately count the number of prisoners who died on Alderney. Dr Gilly

Carr, an archaeologist at Cambridge University, is coordinating the review. Why is this just a document search, not a dig? It is likely that some of the people in mass graves were Jewish, and according to halakha, or Jewish law, you cannot disturb the dead. But the second reason is that according to prisoner statements, some people were dumped at sea or thrown off cliffs. What are we going to do, dig up the entire island? Well, we can't do that. The researchers are drawing on rich material. The Nazis were meticulous record keepers and British archives contain first-hand testimonies

from survivors. Look at this. We were beaten with everything they could lay their hands on, with sticks, spades, pickaxes. It sounds absolutely ghastly. On certain days, five to six, up to ten men died. Dr Carr told us there's no evidence that gas chambers were used on Alderney. But there were summary executions, and the prisoners built the Nazi fortifications on starvation rations. Were they taken to Alderney to be worked to death? They were certainly seen as expendable.

The aim was to get every ounce of work out of them, and if they died, it didn't matter, and that was kind of perhaps expected. They were disposable human beings? Yes. yes. How did your father end up in Alderney? At a pub in the Channel Islands we met Gary Font. His father Francisco Font fought on the losing side in the Spanish Civil War, was arrested in France, handed over to the Germans and sent to a concentration camp on Alderney.

Francisco survived and later married a British woman, Gary's mother. He witnessed the execution of a young Soviet boy who decided to leave the work in detail and to change his footwear. So he decided to pick up these paper bags and wrap them around his feet and then tie them with string. And an SS guard had seen him do this and walked up to him and shot him point blank range. Gary told us his father's It's a tough one. Do you think that emotion came from that he had survived the war in Spain and survived the camp here?

Yeah, absolutely. It was the first time I realised, wow, this man has a deep-rooted emotion inside him that he could never get out. The British government's effort to get the truth out by recounting the dead was commissioned by Lord Pickles. Sir Eric Pickles! A former cabinet minister and now the UK's envoy for post-Holocaust issues.

The figures vary, not by a few hundred, not by a few thousand, but by tens of thousands. So it was the controversy that prompted you to commission the review? Yes. It seemed to me that the sensible thing was, well, OK, let's do this in the open, let's do it fully transparent. He's also asked the researchers to put names to as many of those killed as they can. If you remember them as individuals, then it's another blow against Hitler.

Hitler wanted to eradicate the memory of people. So this is kind of an ongoing fight against Hitler and his ideas. Hitler's evil hand still continues to affect Europe and to affect the world. But it's taken nearly 80 years for the British government to re-examine what happened on Alderney and to make its report public. The official British investigations in 1945 were classified for decades. And unlike the trials of Nazi officials in Nuremberg, the British authorities failed to prosecute a single German officer who worked on Alderney,

even though many of them ended up in British prisoner of war camps. I mean, just to be clear, these are possible war criminals. The British government has gathered evidence against them and they are in British custody. Yes, they are at this point, yes. A sort of slam-dunk case. You'd have thought. That's led Marcus Roberts and others to claim

that the British government tried to cover up the extent of the atrocities on Alderney. Dr Carr told us that could be true, but one key document from the British War Office investigation that may explain why there were no prosecutions is missing. It could have been shredded decades ago as part of what do we need these files for anymore. But could it also have been shredded for more nefarious purposes?

I have no idea. In order for me to say there was a cover-up, I want to see the decisions taken, I want to look through those steps and to make up my own mind. Why might the British government have tried to cover up or whitewash what happened on Alderney and maybe more broadly on the Channel Islands. There were some things that happened that might not... ..that the British government might not necessarily have wanted a wider audience to know about.

Those things, once feared too troubling for the broader public, happened on three of the other Channel Islands, where most residents did not evacuate before the occupation. When the Germans arrived, the locals mostly cooperated, often with little choice. Hitler's portrait was hung outside this cinema on the island of Guernsey. Nazi propaganda showed the British police working for German troops. And British newspapers on the islands printed orders from Berlin.

This is a British newspaper and it's got the SWAS sticker on top. That's right. At the official archives on the island of Jersey, Linda Romerill showed us how British officials implemented Nazi policies, asking Jewish residents to identify themselves and then confiscating their assets. There was a huge amount of requisitioning of people's houses, people's property during the occupation period. But some resisted, risking punishment to paint anti-Nazi graffiti

and illegally listening to British news on the radio. That's my great aunt Louisa. I suspect that she was probably quite steely. One member of the resistance was Louisa Gould, who hid an escaped Russian prisoner in her home for nearly two years. Jenny Lecote told us when her great-aunt Louisa was finally caught, she was sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany. She was killed in a Nazi gas chamber. She was gassed to death, yeah. After the occupation, did the British government get in touch

with your family to talk about what Louisa had done during the occupation and about her murder by the Nazis. The British government, I think, were kind of ashamed. They were horrified that it happened and they didn't really want to get too involved in what had gone on there. Not wanting to talk about the resistance or not wanting to talk about the occupation at all?

Well, it was such a mixed picture. There were people who would resisted the Germans as much as resistance was possible within a tiny nine by five mile island and there were also people who'd collaborated. Some people had betrayed their own country. The only possible legislation was treason which was still a hanging offence. They didn't want to get into that. That was the confusing, messy, dirty mixed picture of the Channel Islands occupation. More of that messy, dirty history was revealed when the British government published its review in May. According to the new count, over a thousand may have died in the camps. Predictably, it hasn't satisfied everyone.

Some kind of an apology and, you know, moral recompense would be helpful. You want the British government to apologise for not having prosecuted alleged war criminals. Yes, I think it would be appropriate for them to recognise what should have been done didn't happen. The horrors carried out on this tiny, remote island are difficult to imagine. The victims were silenced and buried.

But now, nearly eight decades later, they're finally being counted. The white chocolate macadamia cream cold brew from Starbucks is made just the way you like it. Handcrafted cold foam topped with toasted cookie crumble. It's a sweet summer twist on iced coffee. Your cold brew is ready at Starbucks. For many high school students returning to class this month, it may seem like geometry and trigonometry were created by the Greeks as a form of torture. So imagine our amazement when we heard two high school seniors had proved a mathematical puzzle that was thought to be impossible for 2,000 years. We met Kelsey Johnson and Nakia Jackson at their all-girls Catholic high school in New Orleans,

and as we first reported this past spring, we expected to find two mathematical prodigies. Instead, we found at St. Mary's Academy, all students are told their possibilities are boundless. Come Mardi Gras season, New Orleans is alive with colorful parades, replete with floats and beads and high school marching bands. In a city where uniqueness is celebrated, St. Mary's stands out, with young African-American women playing trombones and tubas, twirling batons and dancing, doing it all.

Which defines St. Mary's, students told us. Junior Christina Blasio says the school instills in them they have the ability to accomplish anything. That is kind of a standard here, so we aim very high. Our aim is excellence for all students. The private Catholic elementary and high school sits behind the Sisters of the Holy Family Convent in New Orleans East. The academy was started by an African-American nun for young Black women just after the Civil War. The convent still supports the school with the help of alumni. In December 2022, seniors Nakia Jackson and Kelsey Johnson were working on a school-wide math contest that came with a cash

prize. I was motivated because there was a monetary incentive, because I was like, $500 is a lot of money, so I would like to at least try. Both were staring down the thorny bonus question. So tell me, what was this bonus question? It was to create a new proof of the Pythagorean theorem, and it kind of gave you a few guidelines on how would you start a proof. The seniors were familiar with the Pythagorean theorem, a fundamental principle of geometry.

You may remember it from high school. a squared plus b squared equals c squared. In plain English, when you know the length of two sides of a right triangle, you can figure out the length of the third. Both had studied geometry and some trigonometry, and both told us math was not easy. What no one told them was there'd been more than 300 documented proofs of the Pythagorean theorem using algebra and geometry. But for 2,000 years, a proof using trigonometry was thought to be impossible. And that was the bonus question facing them. When you looked at the question, did you

think, boy, this is hard? Yeah. What motivated you to say, well, I'm going to try this? I think I was like, I started something. I need to finish it. So you just kept on going? Yeah. For two months that winter, they spent almost all their free time working on the proof. She was like, Mom, this is a little bit too much. Cece and Cal Johnson are Kelsey's parents.

So then I started looking at what she really was doing, and it was pages and pages and pages of like over 20 or 30 pages for this one problem. Yeah the garbage can was full of papers where she would you know work out the problems and if that didn't work she would ball it up throw it in the trash. Did you look at the problem? Naliska Jackson is Nakia's mother. Personally, I did not, because most of the time I don't understand what she's doing. What if we did this? What if I write this? Does this help? AX squared. Their math teacher, Michelle Bluen-Williams, initiated the math contest. And did you think anyone would solve it?

Well, I wasn't necessarily looking for a solve, so no idea. What were you looking for? I was just looking for some ingenuity, you know. Kelsey and Nakia delivered on that. They tried to explain their groundbreaking work to 60 Minutes. Kelsey's proof is appropriately titled the waffle cone. So to start the proof, we start with just a regular right triangle where the angle in the corner is 90 degrees and the two angles are alpha and beta. So then what we do next is we draw a

second congruent, which means they're equal in size. But then we start creating similar but smaller right triangles going in a pattern like this. And then it continues for infinity. And eventually it creates this larger waffle cone shape. Am I going a little too...? Yeah, you've been beyond me since the beginning. So how did you figure out the proof? Okay, so we have a right triangle, 90-degree angle, alpha and beta.

Then what did you do? Okay, I have a right triangle inside of the circle, and I have a perpendicular bisector at OP to divide the triangle to make that small right triangle. And that's basically what I use for the proof. That's the proof. That's what I call amazing. Well, thank you. There had been one other documented proof of the theorem using trigonometry by mathematician Jason Zimba in 2009, one in 2,000 years. Now, it seems, Nakia and Kelsey have joined perhaps the most exclusive club in mathematics. So you both independently came up with proof that only used trigonometry.

Yes. So are you math geniuses? I think that's a stretch. If not genius, you're really smart at math. Not at all. To document Kelsey and Nakia's work, math teachers at St. Mary's submitted their proofs to an American Mathematical Society conference in Atlanta in March 2023. Well, our teacher approached us and was like, hey, you might be able to actually present this. I was like, are you joking?

But she wasn't. So we went, I got up there, we presented, and it went well, and it blew up. It blew up. Yeah. What was the blow up like? Insane, unexpected, crazy, honestly. Today's story features two high school students, Kelsey Johnson and Nakia Jackson. It took millennia to prove, but just a minute for word of their accomplishment to go around the world.

They got a write-up in South Korea and a shout-out from former First Lady Michelle Obama, a commendation from the governor, and keys to the city of New Orleans. Why do you think so many people found what you did to be so impressive? Probably because we're African American, one, and we're also women. So I think, oh, and our age. Of course, our age has probably played a big part. So you think people were surprised that young African-American women could do such a thing?

Yes, definitely. I'd like to actually be celebrated for what it is. Like, it's a great mathematical achievement. Achievement. That's a word you hear often around St. Mary's Academy. Kelsey and Nakia follow a long line of barrier-breaking graduates. The late queen of Creole cooking, Leah Chase, was an alum. So was the first African-American female New Orleans police chief, Michelle Woodfork.

And judge for the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, Dana Douglas. Math teacher Michelle Bluen-Williams told us Kelsey and Nakia are typical St. Mary's students. They're not unicorns. Oh, no. If they are unicorns, then every single lady that has matriculated through this school is a beautiful black unicorn. Pamela Rogers, St. Mary's president and interim principal, told us the students hear that message from the moment they walk in the door. We believe all students can succeed. All students can learn. It does not matter the environment that you live in. So when word went out that two of your students had solved this almost impossible math problem, were they universally applauded?

In this community, they were greatly applauded. Across the country, there were many naysayers. What were they saying? They were saying, oh, they could not have done it. African Americans don't have the brains to do it. Of course, we sheltered our girls from that, but we absolutely did not expect it to come in the volume that it came. And after such a wonderful achievement?

People have a vision of who can be successful. And to some people, it is not always an African-American female. And to us, it's always an African-American female. What we know is when teachers lay out some expectations that say, you can do this, kids will work as hard as they can to do it. Gloria Ladson-Billings, professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, has studied how best to teach African-American students. She told us an encouraging teacher can change a life.

And what's the difference, say, between having a teacher like that and a whole school dedicated to the excellence of these students? So a whole school is almost like being in heaven. What do you mean by that? Many of our young people have their ceilings lowered. That somewhere around 4 or fifth grade, their thoughts are,

I'm not going to be anything special. What I think is probably happening at St. Mary's is young women come in as perhaps ninth graders and are told, here's what we expect to happen, and here's how we're going to help you get there. Who is the author of this story? At St. Mary's, half the students get scholarships subsidized by fundraising to defray the $8,000 a year tuition.

Here, there's no test to get in, but expectations are high and rules are strict. No cell phones, modest skirts, hair must be its natural color. Students Raya Sadiq, Summer Ford, Carissa Washington, Tatum Williams, and Christina Blasio told us they appreciate the rules and rigor. Especially the standards that they set for us, they're very high, and I don't think that's ever going to change. So is there a heart of philosophy, an essence to St. Mary's? The sisterhood. The sisterhood. Yes. And you don't mean the nuns, you mean you. So when you're here, there's just no question that you're going to go on to college. College is all they talk about.

And Arizona State University. Principal Rogers announces to her 615 students the colleges where every senior has been accepted. So for 17 years, you've had a 100% graduation rate and a 100% college acceptance rate. That's correct. Nakia Jackson. Last year, when Nakia and Kelsey graduated, all their classmates went to college and got scholarships. Nakia got a full ride to the pharmacy school at Xavier University in New Orleans.

Kelsey, the class valedictorian, is studying environmental engineering at Louisiana State University. So wait a minute. Neither one of you is going to pursue a career in math? No. No. I may take up a minor in math, but I don't want that to be my job job. Yeah. People might expect too much out of me if I become a mathematician. But math is not completely in their rearview mirrors.

This spring, they submitted their high school proofs for final peer review and publication and are still working on further proofs of the Pythagorean theorem. Since their first two... We found five, and then we found a general format that could potentially produce at least five additional proofs. And you're not math geniuses?

No, no. I'm not buying it. I'm Bill Whitaker. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes. Paramount Podcasts.