Sookie Williams was a young widow with a baby daughter when she moved to Miami in 1946 and went looking for a job at Miami International Airport. She already had considerable experience working at a “Rosie the riveter” factory in New Jersey and had even received a presidential citation for her work helping build the atomic bomb.

But this was Miami, and the answer Williams got from a man at the airport was, “Honey, you don’t know you’re in Florida. We don’t take women.”