Annie Lee Moss

Annie Lee Moss
Annie Lee Moss and her attorney George Edward Chalmers Hayes (partially obscured) testifying before the McCarthy committee on March 12, 1954
Born	Annie Lee Crawford August 9, 1905 South Carolina
Died	January 1, 1996(1996-01-01) (aged 90) Washington, D.C.
Occupation	Communications clerk US Army Signal Corps
Known for	involvement in the McCarthy hearings
Salary	$3,335 in 1955 (approximately $30,000 today)

Annie Lee Moss (August 9, 1905 – January 15, 1996) was a communications clerk in the US Army Signal Corps in the Pentagon and alleged member of the American Communist Party. She was believed to be a security risk by the FBI and her superiors at the US Army Signal Corps and was questioned by United States Senator Joseph McCarthy in his role as the chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The highly publicized case was damaging to McCarthy's popularity and influence.

She was born as Annie Lee Crawford in 1905 in South Carolina. She had six siblings, and her father was a tenant farmer. Her family moved to North Carolina where she left high school to work as a domestic servant and a laundress. She married Ernest Moss in 1926, and they moved to Durham, North Carolina, where she worked in the tobacco industry.

Moss began her career in the Federal government as a dessert cook in government cafeterias. In 1945, she moved to a job as a clerk in the General Accounting Office and in 1949 secured a civil service position as an Army Signal Corps communications clerk at the Pentagon. A widowed mother, Moss had steadily improved her position since moving to Washington, D.C., in the early 1940s. She bought a home in 1950 and by 1954 had an annual income of $3,300 (approximately $29,000 today) a year, well above the median for black women at the time.

In accordance with a loyalty review program introduced by President Harry S. Truman in 1947, Moss was investigated by the loyalty board of the General Accounting Office in October 1949. The next year, when Moss was promoted to communications clerk at the Pentagon, she was reinvestigated by the Army’s Loyalty-Security Screening Board. The result of this investigation was that Moss was suspended from her position with the recommendation that she be discharged. She appealed this decision and was cleared by the Army board in January 1951.