Ever Hear of the Snake Pit at the National Security Agency?
Published: Fri, 04/11/25
Updated: Fri, 04/11/25
Hint: It was pre-DEI
April 11, 2025
Hello ,
They
called it the snake pit, the hot, humid, noisy room where Black men and women with college degrees toiled day after day, week after week...at the mind-numbing task of feeding paper into a machine.
They worked at the US National Security Agency, beefed up in the early 1950s due to the Cold War with Russia. The NSA hired hundreds of workers for a wide variety of jobs. No
matter their qualifications, Black men and women were stuck in the lowest ranked jobs.
This was more than a decade before the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. Black women had proven themselves on the home front and in the armyduring World War II, but the white supremacists structure of American business and government refused to give them a chance at equal employment.
Iris Carr worked
in the snake pit. Her story takes us back to the days before Affirmative Action and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policies. It's worth a look at what some people call the good 'ole days.
Would Iris Escape the Snake Pit?
A top-secret government cryptology unit at the NSA during WWII employed thousands of women, fifteen percent of whom were black, due to Eleanor Roosevelt's efforts promoting equal employment during the war.
Segregated
"commercial code" units tracked Morse code transmissions sent by foreign companies, watching for any suspicious communication or odd bit of information that might be helpful to the war effort.
Black “code girls” at Arlington Hall Station.
Photo courtesy of Center for Local History, Arlington Public
Library
When the fighting ended, the country focused on getting back to normal, which for many blacks meant discrimination by government and business that trapped them in low-wage jobs for which they were over-qualified.
Iris Carr liked her work as a teacher in Austin, Texas, but the school district wouldn't allow her to pay into the teachers retirement fund because she was black. She knew she had to find a different job. "I could see myself as a little old lady of sixty or seventy with no income and not able to work," she said.
Iris Carr, circa 1950s.
Iris moved to Washington D.C. and found the National Security Agency was hiring. With the escalation of the Cold War with the Soviet Union in the early 1950s, the agency was growing exponentially to handle the collection, processing and interpretation of intelligence.
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 snake pit, 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 landed one of these jobs, glad to have retirement benefits. But she went to work in a hot, humid, noisy room running paper tape of radio printer signals through a machine that 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," she 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 to 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."
But it was years before well-prepared black women were hired as linguists and computer programmers at the NSA. Vera Shoffner Russell was one of them.
"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," she said. "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 a programmer 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, but she felt she had no choice but to accept it.
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.
Affirmative Action policies by the federal government made progress against discrimination by requiring employers to consider black applicants who were qualified for the job. Not as some people believe, to hire black and brown people for jobs they are not qualified.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policies are a form of Affirmative Action that stemmed from the Civil Rights Act of 1964. CNN
did some reporting on exactly what DEI means.
Among seven DEI experts and industry leaders CNN has interviewed, most had a shared vision for what constitutes the concept:
Diversity is embracing the differences everyone brings to the table, whether those are someone’s race, age, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, physical ability or other aspects of social identity.
Equity is treating everyone fairly and providing equal opportunities.
Inclusion is respecting everyone’s voice and creating a culture in which people from all backgrounds feel encouraged to express their ideas and perspectives.
DEI was created because marginalized communities have not always had equal opportunities for jobs or
felt a sense of belonging in majority-White corporate settings, said Daniel Oppong, founder of The Courage Collective, a consultancy that advises companies on DEI.
“That is the genesis of why some of these programs exist,” he said. “It was an attempt to try to create workplaces where more or all people can thrive.”
Under the current Republican Administration, presidential executive orders have resulted in hundreds and possibly thousands of federal employees being fired because of their connection, or
perceived connection, to government DEI programs and initiatives. A number have not been told why they were fired. More on that story here.
The administration's crackdown has also included
webpages and books on topics deemed overly diverse and inclusive, including women's history as I wrote about here.
Like my article today? Forward this email to share with family and friends.
Sources
Many thanks to Jeannette Williams of the National Security Agency, Center for Cryptologic History, who dug up the facts about these
pioneering code women and wrote the NSA pamphlet The Invisible Cryptologists: African-Americans, WWII to 1956.
Did you see the pictures of the demonstrators at our national parks last weekend?
I loved them!
From the Grand Canyon to the Rocky
Mountains to Yellowstone and beyond, thousands gathered across the country on Saturday to protest sweeping federal cuts to the United States’ historic public lands.
Read
a great book? Have a burning question? Let me know. If you know someone who might enjoy my newsletter or books, please forward this e-mail. I will never spam you or sell your email address, you can unsubscribe anytime at the link below.
To find out more about my books, how I help students, teachers, librarians and writers visit my website at www.MaryCronkFarrell.com.
Author Mary Cronk Farrell
Mary writes compelling history books about courageous unknown women who helped shape American history.
Her newest book CLOSE UP ON WAR: THE STORY OF PIONEERING PHOTOJOURNALIST CATHERINE LEROY IN VIETNAM has four starred reviews. Both teens and adults enjoy Mary's books
