Black History is cybersecurity history

Arlington Hall’s African American unit at the National Security Agency from Liza Mundy’s book “Code Girls”

Hidden but Vital Figures

As with the most of the American experience at the time the initial African American code breaks went from military to Army Security Agency (ASA) a precursor to the NSA, and then Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA), were segregated into their own units and offices.

Since the earliest of cyphers, as long as there has been ciphertext there have been black and brown cryptographers. Whether they were special messages of faith, military movements, or pathway to freedom, African Americans have been a part of the history of coded messages, technology, and the practice of protecting the two. Unfortunately like the image above that is featured in this post, the stories and information behind it are lost to time. In the Author’s Note to her book “Code Girls”, Liza Mundy talks about the fact that the image is about all that is left. This had us think, what are we doing now to preserve the history and stories of black hackers and cybersecurity professionals? We decided to do our part and start collecting as much as we could, posting it here, and archiving it on archive.org for the future.

Now that the CryptoHarlem site is relaunched look to this area for stories by, from, and about the African American’s contributing to the space of Cybersecurity. After all our research we are even more confident when we say, Black History is cybersecurity history.