July 21, 2017 Hello , As a teenager, I worked long days "slaving" in the fields, on my knees in the dirt, picking strawberries. It was
hard, miserable work, but I knew it was temporary. No more than a month each summer, and I knew it would end when I went to college. Plus, for a teenager, it was good money.
I can't imagine being stuck in a menial job as an adult, employed well below my capabilities, with little hope of advancement, and all because I was born with
black skin.
This would take a kind of every-day courage, that I will never know if I possess.
This week as I was selecting photos for my book about African American's in the Women's Army Corps, I discovered a photo that piqued my interest. It shows a segregated unit of cyptologists working for the National
Security Agency near the end of WWII. This was the "commercial code" unit with the job of tracking Morse code transmissions sent by foreign companies, with an eye to any suspicious communication, or odd bit
of information or that might be helpful to the war effort.
In 1945, the only positions in the NSA open to African Americans were
custodian, messenger, and the few jobs in this small unit.
However, later in the early 1950s, with the escalation of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, the NSA grew exponentially with increasing need for intelligence collection, processing and interpretation. The agency began to hire blacks to process a type of message called Russian plain text. This branch, later an entire division came to be known by names like the snakepit, the plantation, and the black hole
of Calcutta.
There were an occasional few white employees, but the vast majority were black men and women with college degrees, hired at the lowest civilian government rating and pay. It was menial, dirty, mind-numbing work, with no chance of advancement. Iris Carr, at right, moved to Washington D.C. because in Austin, Texas, where she taught school, they wouldn't allow blacks to pay into the teachers retirement fund.
"I could see myself as a little old lady of sixty or seventy with no income and not able to work," Iris said.
Landing one of these jobs at the NSA, Iris had retirement benefits. But she went to work in a hot, humid, noisy room running paper tape of radioprinter signals through a machine which read coded perforations and printed the corresponding
Cyrillic characters.
It was a repetitive, manual task requiring minimal cognitive skills, the results of which were sent for analysis by NSA linguists, part of a huge national security effort effort keeping tabs on the Russians.
But Iris was stuck in the snakepit. "I tried to get out," Iris said. "Openings would be posted on the board, and I would apply...but it was almost unknown to transfer. At that time, it seems like the whites would come in with no degree and in a little while they would move on up. Iris continued to work hard, diligently and motivate those around her. She was known as an unheralded hero by African American NSA employees of that era. "I was so involved in what the Agency stood for, and I wanted it to be better. I had a feeling that things were going to get better," Iris said. "Everybody in there was not evil. I felt that one day
African-Americans would break out of this box and be able to go into reporting or personnel or other areas, if they were prepared. I preached – be prepared." In the late 1950's, a number of African Americans broke the color barrier at the NSA to get better paying jobs, such as linguists and computer
programmers.
Most of the black women hired had faced many hurdles long before they reached the NSA. Vera Shoffner Russell (left) explains.
"I was a math and physics graduate and had an offer to teach school in Winston-Salem [North Carolina], but I didn’t want to teach. At the
time, however, for the most part, when [blacks] came out of college, you went to teach. Teaching and preaching were the only things open."
Vera was one of the lucky few African American women hired as programmers on one of the NSA's early computers. She was hired sight-unseen and believed they thought from her maiden surname, that she was white.
When she arrived they offered her a lower pay grade than promised. She took it anyway.
There's no way to now how many black men and women trapped in dead-end jobs at the NSA grew bitter and gave up. But we know some of them, like Iris, not only had the courage to continue working, but to believe that a better day would come, and the spirit to help others believe it, too. That's inspiring to
me!
Many thanks to Jeannette Williams of the National Security Agency, Center for Cryptologic History, who dug up the facts about these pioneering men and women and wrote the NSA pamphlet The Invisible Cryptologists: African-Americans, WWII to 1956. This week I polished off one last revision of my upcoming book about the amazing courage of black women who volunteered for the Women's Army Corps during WWII.
And I have been busy finalizing details for the children's writers and illustrators conference we're offering in Spokane September 16th. Registration is open. If you know anyone who might be interested in attending, please pass along this e-mail to them. All the information about the conference and how to register is available here: Plot Your Course Until next week... Have you read a great book? Tell me about it. Have a burning question? Let me know.
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