During WWII Arlington Hall Station was a former women's college that became a major cryptography center, uniquely employing up to 15% Black women, though many remained anonymous.
These women intercepted and decoded enemy messages, identified patterns, and monitored commercial communications for illicit Axis trade, crucial for naval victories and troop movements.

Some of the key figures and their roles are;
Ethel Just who was a Howard University language professor led a team of translators in the Languages section connected with Commercial Traffic codes deciphered by the segregated Black (B-3-b) unit at Arlington Hall Station during WWII. Monitored all international traffic, from Tokyo to Berlin.

Annie Briggs was from 1944, asst. to Col. William Coffee in the segregated Black (B-3-b) unit breaking Commercial Traffic codes at Arlington Hall Station during WWII. Worked in Production section, which decoded messages/gave clerical support. Likely the 1st Black woman codebreaker hired by the US Army. She headed the production unit, identifying and deciphering codes.

Elsie Scott, Sue Bailey Thurman, Genevieve Collins, and Genevieve Arthur who rose to section head at the NSA, documented by the agency itself, entered on duty at the Army Security Agency in 1947. She spent her entire career in the key punch (early machine decryption) unit, retiring in 1973 as a section head.

The racism of white Americans low standards about Black Americans highlight the willful silence about the achievements of these Black women codebreakers who worked at Arlington Hall.

These Black women made significant contributions to the war effort through their work as code breakers.
They were silent heroes, using intellect and perseverance to decode enemy secrets and significantly contributing to Allied victory under challenging, segregated work conditions. Their contributions were only recently brought to light through declassification and historical efforts, with many identities remaining unknown.

Black women who worked at Arlington Hall were segregated from their white counterparts — kept tabs on messages from the private sector, ensuring that American companies were not doing business with Nazi Germany or Japanese companies.

Overall, women made up 70% of the American domestic codebreaking force, noted Adam Howard, the director of the Office of the Historian at the State Department. African American women codebreakers played a critical, though largely hidden, role in both World Wars, using math and pattern recognition to decrypt enemy messages, identify troop movements, and intercept vital intelligence, significantly aiding the Allies by saving lives and potentially shortening the wars, despite enduring segregation and discrimination in segregated units at places like Arlington Hall Station.

Early WWI Efforts: Black mathematicians and linguists, like James A. Dunbar, began analyzing German communications in segregated units, laying groundwork for future efforts.

WWII "Code Girls": Thousands of women, many Black, worked as cryptologists at Arlington Hall Station, breaking German Enigma and Japanese codes, tracking enemy supply ships, and monitoring private sector communications to find Nazi ties.

In early 1996, the History Center received as a donation a book of rather monotonous photographs of civilian employees at one of NSA’s predecessors receiving citations for important contributions. Out of several hundred photographs, only two included African Americans – an employee receiving an award from Colonel Preston Corderman (reproduced on page 14) and the same employee posing with his family. […] the war came, and we needed to expand. They bought Arlington Hall, and built two buildings – A Building and B Building – and we moved on Thanksgiving Day of ‘42. I’m not sure when the first blacks came, but Geneva Arthur was one of the early ones [in 1947].

Geneva Arthur.
Just saying, Mundy allegedly “scoured” NSA records and then left out Geneva Arthur in the machine section, a Black woman who rose all the way to being section head before retiring in 1973 as documented in 2001 by the NSA. Annie Briggs and Ethel Just also were mentioned in the same book by the NSA.

Sources: National Park Service; DCist; National Archives; The Flying Penguin

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The Black Women Code Breakers of Arlington Hall Station Their top-secret unit played a critical role during World War II.
By Kim O’Connell / Arlington Magazine- June 7, 2021

Sheryl Everett Wormley remembers her grandmother Ethel Just as an accomplished scholar and collegiate educator who broke barriers for Black women during the Jim Crow era. With a bachelor’s degree from Ohio State and a master’s from Boston University, Just became dean of women at South Carolina State University around 1950.

Those probably weren’t her only career achievements, although the others are harder to trace. During World War II, a unit of African American women secretly worked as code breakers in Arlington as part of America’s massive intelligence operation, which employed roughly 10,000 women code breakers in total. By deciphering encrypted communications, the women helped the Allied forces target Axis leaders and enemy ships—and even coordinate the D-Day invasion.

Their command center was Arlington Hall Station, a former women’s junior college that became a key wartime cryptography center. (Today it houses the George P. Shultz National Foreign Affairs Training Center at George Mason Drive and Route 50.) The station was unusual for the time in that up to 15% of its workforce was Black—an effort at equity that Eleanor Roosevelt may have dictated herself.

But between the top-secret nature of the work and the racial segregation of the period, even people working at Arlington Hall were unaware that Just’s special unit existed. Whereas stories of their white counterparts have come to light as records have been declassified, the identities of most of Arlington’s Black code breakers remain unknown.

In researching her book, Mundy scoured National Security Agency records, among many other sources, and uncovered only two names of Arlington’s Black women code breakers: Annie Briggs, who headed up the production unit, which worked to identify and decipher codes; and Ethel Just, who led a team of translators.

William Coffee, a Black man, supervised the women and recruited many of them, later winning an award for his wartime leadership.

Genealogical and newspaper archives suggest that the Ethel Just of Arlington Hall was likely Ethel Highwarden Just, a Howard University language professor who married pioneering Black biologist Ernest Everett Just. The couple lived in Washington, D.C., and had three children before they divorced around 1939.

Although definitive proof of Just’s role in the code breaking unit is elusive, the October 1956 edition of The Negro History Bulletin (a periodical launched in 1937 by African American historian Carter G. Woodson) states that Ethel Just worked as a “translator in the War Department.”

“William Coffee may have known people who attended or taught at Howard,” Mundy says. “It wouldn’t surprise me at all if the country’s historically Black colleges and universities contributed many members of the code breaking unit.”
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