Port Chicago

[David Lockmiller]

Seventy-five years ago today (July 17, 2019), at a naval munitions base northeast of San Francisco called Port Chicago, 320 men were killed in a massive explosion that “filled the sky with flame,” destroyed two ships and shattered windows miles away.

It also tipped off a chain of events that would pave the way for the desegregation of the U.S. armed forces.

Because the Navy was segregated and the U.S. was in the throes of World War II, the men doing the dangerous work of loading munitions onto ships were almost all black and inadequately trained.

“I said, ‘Lieutenant, one of these days, this base is going to blow sky high,’” one survivor, Joe Small, recalled later. “He said, ‘Well, if it does, you won’t know anything about it.’”

A short Associated Press article on the front page of The Times on July 18, 1944, said the blast “virtually leveled” the small town of Port Chicago and left hospitals “jammed with the injured.” Of the dead, more than 200 were black.

The next day, the men who weren’t injured had to recover bodies. And while white supervising officers were allowed to take “survivors’ leave,” to be with their families, black men were ordered to go back to work moving explosives, said Robert Allen, a retired U.C. Berkeley professor of ethnic and African-American studies who has studied the Port Chicago disaster.

More than 250 survivors of the explosion, one of the worst home-front disasters of the war, balked, and stopped working.

“They were in shock,” Mr. Allen said. “There was no violence — no protest.”

Nonetheless, they were accused of mutiny.

When Mr. Allen first learned of the disaster, he was a reporter and was researching issues of race in the Vietnam era. In the archives of a local longshoremen’s union, he came across an old pamphlet that intrigued him.

“The title was, ‘Mutiny? The real story of how the Navy branded 50 fear-shocked sailors as mutineers,’” Mr. Allen recalled recently. “I discovered quickly that nothing much had been written about it.”

He has since spent decades rectifying that, including by publishing a book about the explosion and the mutiny trial of 50 black sailors that followed. And this week, Berkeley’s Oral History Center is set to post new audio accounts from survivors, which Mr. Allen conducted.

When the 50 men who were singled out as ringleaders of the mutiny were placed on trial, it attracted the notice of Thurgood Marshall, who was then a lawyer for the N.A.A.C.P.

As The Times reported at the time, all 50 were found guilty and sentenced to prison terms ranging from eight to 15 years. But Mr. Marshall had succeeded in bringing the sailors’ plight to the attention of the president, Mr. Allen said.

Mr. Marshall appealed the sentencing, and some of the sailors were released from prison early — not to go home, but to finish out their naval service. This time, however, they were allowed to serve on ships.

As Mr. Allen put it: “After having gone through hell and prison, they are now getting their opportunity to be treated like the white sailors.”

President Franklin D. Roosevelt also pressed naval leaders to allow other black sailors to serve on ships, which showed other branches of the military that they, too, could desegregate.

“It put the military, which had always been one of the most segregated institutions in American life, and especially the Navy, in the vanguard of the struggle for racial justice,” Mr. Allen said, “which is such an irony.”

Still, the Port Chicago 50 were never formally cleared.

But earlier this week, the House passed a measure directing the Secretary of the Navy to publicly exonerate the men. It was introduced by Representative Mark DeSaulnier, whose district includes Port Chicago.

Mr. Allen said that as far as he knows, none of the Port Chicago 50 are still alive.

The effort, however, “is a welcome, if very belated correction.”

In order to see a couple of photographs, go here:

Port Chicago