Monday Starter: Barkley donating $1 million to New Orleans Catholic academy
CBS News' Bill Whitaker interviews Ne'Kiya Jackson and Calcea Johnson on 60 Minutes (NCR screenshot/CBS News)
Former NBA star Charles Barkley is donating $1 million to St. Mary's Academy in New Orleans, a prominent Black Catholic school founded by the Sisters of the Holy Family, an African American congregation, because he was inspired by the work of two academy graduates who discovered what many said was an impossible mathematics proof.
According to a May 29 report in the Black Catholic Messenger, the $1 million gift was prompted by a recent segment of the CBS News program "60 Minutes," which featured academy graduates Calcea Johnson and Ne'Kiya Jackson, who are now students at Louisiana State University and Xavier University of Louisiana, respectively.
On a May 5 segment, they related their mathematical discovery, which prompted headlines and more than 1 million social media views, the Messenger reported.
The segment also garnered the attention of Barkley, the renowned one-time basketball player and NBA commentator, who is said to never miss the popular CBS news program, and was impressed by the graduates and their education at the academy.
As reported by the Messenger's Nate Tinner-Williams, the two women were academy seniors when "discovered a new trigonometric proof for the Pythagorean Theorem, sparking discourse on the history of the formula and its enduring conundrums."
"Only one other similar proof has been found before, and experts have said the acumen required to do what the two teens did is rare. Their work was presented at an academic conference last year," the Messenger reported.
The two women have denied being mathematics geniuses but said all praise is due to the rigorous education they received at St. Mary's — one of the oldest Black Catholic schools in the United States. The school was founded in 1867 by the Sisters of the Holy Family. The congregation's founder is Venerable Henriette DeLille, a long-time advocate for Black education, whose path to beatification has been championed by the congregation.
St. Mary's current president, Pamela M. Rogers, told Bill Whitaker of CBS that for 17 successive years, the school has had both a 100% graduation rate and a 100% college acceptance rate, the Messenger reported. Johnson was the school's valedictorian in 2023.
"Our students can do anything, and that's what we tell them," Rogers told Whitaker on the CBS broadcast.
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