The story of African-American codebreakers is both maddening and motivating, demanding a candid acknowledgment of both facets. Across a significant portion of the US in the 1940s and into the ‘50s, schools, housing, restaurants, hotels, and movie theaters were legally segregated based on race - and for the most part, the US military and signals intelligence reflected those divisions. 

Carl Dodd moved from North Carolina to Washington, D.C. in 1941 to avoid the Ku Klux Klan after his uncle’s unexplained death; his parents deemed it safer although he was just 17. Initially, Carl worked in construction then became a messenger in the Office of the Chief Signal Officer earning $42 every two weeks. After rent and bills there was nothing left.

“At that time, the cafeteria was segregated,” he recalled the NSA’s history book, The Invisible Cryptologists. ”They had little cubby holes in the back where you could go and get food… I went to a place on the wharf called Benny Bordnick’s. We couldn’t go in there and sit down either, but we could buy their fish sandwiches, crab cakes, or whatever we wanted and take it back.”

In 1948, Dodds joined the Army Security Agency, a precursor to the NSA SIGINT spies. Times were changing. The glaring contradiction between America fighting fascism overseas while perpetuating racial injustices at home became undeniable. The quest for equality was the driving force behind a significant transformation in the employment of African-Americans at Arlington Hall Station, home of the Army Security Agency and NSA from 1942 to the mid-50s.
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Black cryptologists & spies‍

In early 1944, a segregated unit of black cryptologists was established at Arlington Hall. They were hired by another African-American, William Coffee, who rose from janitor to messenger and then cryptographic clerk with the professional title of Assistant Civilian In Charge of B-3-b. He oversaw a staff of 19.

Their mission was to analyze commercial codes, a type of shorthand that developed with Morse code to save corporations money on transmissions. The US wanted insight into commercial trade and travel data as well as intel on the economic conditions of nations including Australia, Great Britain, Russia, China, and Japan. B-3-b analysts were to detect anything that wasn’t routine trade. Coffee excelled at his role and was awarded the Meritorious Service Award in 1946.

By the early 1950s, the hiring of African Americans rose dramatically during the Cold War with Moscow. They worked mainly in two areas: machine processing (equipment operations and keypunch) and Russian plaintext processing. Newly hired William Jones enrolled in a Russian course and worked in AFSA-213 from November 1951 until mid-1955: “I entered a spacious area occupied solely by black personnel, overseen by an Air Force major. The room featured long tables against the walls, each equipped with eight to 10 printer-like machines designed for five-level punch paper tape,” he recalled in the NSA’s oral history interviews.

The work was monotonous. Inadequate salaries, repetitive tasks, and a lack of advancement prospects contributed to low morale. The agency's managers wanted to improve the situation by introducing piped-in music, but the plan never got off the ground. The audio would have had to be at an ear-piercing level to be heard over the din of 100 teletype machines.

Some, like Iris Carr, took pride in serving their country, despite the working conditions: "We learned to read a Russian dictionary and we could pick up bits of information on different tapes," she recalled. The recruitment of African Americans as tabulating equipment operators or key punchers exploded in the early 1950s, coinciding with the armed conflict in Korea.

Real change at last?

Despite President Truman's push for fair employment, the Russian plaintext processing unit remained predominantly black into the ‘50s, with African Americans concentrated in lower salary grades. 

There were exceptions, however. Arlington’s Research and Development organization hired Carroll Robinson, its first black engineer, alongside Mitchell Brown and Charles Matthews, to work on building the Agency's first in-house developed digital computer, ABNER 1.

“Even though you were hired at a grade lower than your white counterpart, it was still a job, and it probably was a pretty good salary at the time - $2,100,” Matthews said.
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Raymond Weir, Jr., a D.C. schoolteacher and WWII veteran, was also recruited as a polygraph examiner - the first African-American examiner in the US. He was confined to interviewing only black individuals at the NSA until the 1960s, however, then, in stages, he was gradually assigned a demographic cross-section and became the first African-American president of the American Polygraph Association.

By the mid-1950s, Carl Dodd - the North Carolina native who left home to avoid the KKK at the age of 17 - was working as a supervisor in NSA-63 (the African-American traffic processing division), redrafting job descriptions which resulted in an upgrade of all positions in the division. When NSA-63 was finally dissolved in 1956 as part of a bigger reorganization, it was seen as a symbol of the end of NSA workplace segregation although questions about equality remained.