Tara Hunter was in the sixth grade when her grandmother, Felicia LeVon Johnson, died. She remembers visiting her grandmother’s house in Alabama during the summer, and Johnson cooking her her favorite meals, driving with her on her way to work and sharing conversations.

Hunter and the rest of the family knew that Johnson had served in the military during World War II, but Johnson rarely talked in detail about those years.

It wasn’t until just a handful of years ago, decades after Johnson’s death, that Hunt’s father discovered Johnson’s name on a memorial to members of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, an all-Black, all-female group of military personnel responsible for overcoming a vast backlog of mail to and from soldiers deployed in Europe.

“We obviously knew she was in the military in WWII, and that she was overseas,” Hunt said.

“It wasn’t until 2019 that we found out that she was actually part of this unit, and that they’d just dedicated a monument, so there was something significant about it.”

“Prior to that, the family had no idea.”

Recently dramatized in the Tyler Perry Netflix original film “The Six Triple Eight,” the battalion managed to deliver 17 million backlogged pieces of mail to their intended recipients.

Hunt returned from a trip to Washington D.C. last week where her grandmother and her fellow 855 service members were honored by Congress and awarded the Congressional Gold Medal.

“My daughter, my dad, my aunt and one of my cousins were all able to make it out there from various parts of the country,” Hunt said.

“They had members of Congress speaking, we got to see the medal up close.”

Race played an important role in the story of the Six Triple Eight. A segregated battalion, many of the members said they found Europe a more welcoming place for Black people.“It was still a time when they were trying to get their rights,” Hunt said. “They weren’t necessarily being welcomed or treated well. So being in Europe, they were light years ahead of us when it came to stuff like that. Not that it didn’t exist, but it was a much more welcoming environment.”

In fact, the absence of the United States’ fraught racial history produced some other kinds of charming misconceptions, Hunt said.

“She talked about how little children would come up to her and rub her skin and see if the color would come off,” Hunt remembered of her grandmother’s stories of rural France, where residents might never have seen a Black person before. “She was more amused than anything by it.”

Many of the battalion’s members were college graduates, Hunt said, not necessarily common for Black women at the time, predating the Civil Rights Act. She said that the choice to serve instead represented a sense of duty, the same sense that she wonders led her grandmother to never tell her family what she did overseas.

“These were women who had certain options,” Hunt said.

“But they chose to do this. Just like everybody else, they did their job. They came back from war and didn’t see the significance. Or even if they did see the significance, that was their job.”