Final outcome? Fifty years after the Port Chicago mutiny - includes related article on Navy's investigation into the September 1944 court martial case

Almost 50 years ago, as the world waited anxiously to learn whether the D-Day landing would lead to the swift defeat of Nazi Germany, the United States experienced its worst home-front disaster of World War II--and placed the blame squarely on African Americans.

On the evening of July 17, 1944, the Port Chicago naval ammunition base located on San Francisco Bay, about 30 miles northeast of San Francisco, erupted in an explosion so violent that an air force pilot flying above reported that "there was a huge ring of fire spread out to all sides, first covering about three miles--and then it seemed to come straight up. We were cruising at 9,000 feet, and there were pieces of metal ... that went quite a way above us. [These pieces] were as big as a house."

On the ground the devastation was measured differently: 320 men died (only 51 bodies sufficiently intact to be identified were recovered), about 390 Navy personnel were injured, and two cargo ships at the loading pier were destroyed. At the town of Port Chicago, located a mile away, falling debris--including undetonated bombs and jagged chunks of smoldering metal weighing up to hundreds of pounds--damaged 300 homes and stores, injured 109 people, and delivered such a blow to the community that it never recovered.

Of the 320 men killed at the base, 202 were black ammunition loaders. Of the 390 men injured, 233 were black. Indeed, every U.S. Navy man handling ammunition at Port Chicago was black, and every officer directing them was white. The black sailors--most of whom were in their teens and lacked formal training--had been assigned to racially segregated working divisions and to racially segregated barracks. Many had complained both about the Navy's Jim Crow conditions and about the unsafe working practices at the base.

The white officers, many of them inexperienced reservists, sometimes raced their work divisions against each other--in part to relieve the boredom, with wagers laid against brother officers, and in part to speed up loading.

Just before the eruption, Cyril Sheppard was reading a letter, when "suddenly there were two explosions," he says. "I found myself flying toward the wall. ... I hit the wall. Then the next one came right behind that, phoom! Knocked me back on the other side. Men were screaming, the lights went out, and glass was flying all over the place. ... The whole building was turned around, caving in. We were a mile and a half away from the ships. ...

"I said, |Jesus Christ, the Japs have hit!' ... But one of the officers was shouting, |It's the ships! It's the ships!' So we jumped in one of the trucks and we said let's go down there, see if we can help. We got halfway down there on the truck and stopped. Guys were shouting at the driver of the truck, |Go on down. What the hell are you staying up here for?' The driver says, |Can't go no farther.' See, there wasn't no more docks. Wasn't no railroad. Wasn't no ships. And the water came up to ... all the way back."

Jack Crittenden was sitting by a window when there was "this great big flash, and then something must have hit me. I found myself outside of the building and I don't remember going out of no window or climbing out," he says. He just remembers seeing the building he had been in and the barracks caving in, windows broken. "You know, a lot of guys were sleeping in the barracks," he continues. "They were blown to pieces. Some guys lost their sight; others were badly cut."

Only three weeks after the explosion, the surviving ammunition loaders were ordered back to work under the same officers and the same working conditions. Saying that they feared another disaster, 258 men balked at the August directive to resume loading ammunition. As a consequence, they were locked up on a barge for several days while their officers considered what to do. Eventually, 50 black sailors were singled out and formally charged with conspiring to mutiny, "the United States then being in a state of war." This last clause was critical, for it raised the specter of death sentences.

Placed on trial for their lives in September 1944, the men found themselves in a small, crowded courtroom. Seven senior Navy officers presided, serving as both judges and jurors. The 50 accused seamen sat with their backs against the wall, seemingly more on the periphery than at the heart of the matter. They were confronted by a prosecuting team led by Lt. Cmdr. James F. Coakley, who would gain notoriety a quarter of a century later as the hard-line Alameda County, Calif., district attorney who prosecuted antiwar activists and leading Black Panther Party members, including Huey P. Newton and Eldridge Cleaver.

A new element was added 22 days into the trial: Thurgood Marshall, the chief counsel for the NAACP, arrived in court, his trip to California aided by a special wartime travel priority arranged by the Secretary of the Navy. The Navy's assistance to Marshall owed much to the publicity generated in the black press by the case. The Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier and the NAACP's Crisis magazine were particularly active in informing the community about Port Chicago and the looming death sentences of the black sailors.

Marshall, however, could do little to help the men's immediate defense, which was predicated on the distinction between individual insubordination and organized mutiny--between the men's stated fear of unloading ammunition (and their related willingness to accept a jail sentence in order to get a change of duty) and a refusal to obey a direct order. In essence, the men claimed that they had no idea that their verbal expression of fear constituted mutiny.

After 32 days of hearings, the presiding officers retired to consider their verdicts. Those verdicts were reached 80 minutes later: all 50 defendants were found guilty and sentenced to 15 years' imprisonment. (The remaining 208 prisoners were convicted of lesser charges in summary courts-martial and briefly imprisoned.)

Marshall was already at work on a legal appeal and on the wider implications of the case. As he noted, "This is not 50 men put on trial for mutiny. This is the Navy on trial for its whole vicious policy toward Negroes. ... Negroes are not afraid of anything any more than anyone else. Negroes in the Navy don't mind loading ammunition. They just want to know why they are the only ones doing the loading! They want to know why they are segregated; why they don't get promoted."

Calling for a formal government investigation of the circumstances that led to the men's work stoppage, Marshall identified three issues to be addressed: why black seamen were essentially restricted to shore duty as laborers in segregated work brigades, why the ammunition unloading procedures at Port Chicago were so dangerous and why the men were untrained in their tasks, and why the 50 men were singled out for potential death sentences when their behavior was no different from that of the other 208 men charged with lesser offenses.

"I want to know," Marshall continued, "why the Navy disregarded official warnings by the San Francisco waterfront unions--before the Port Chicago disaster--that an explosion was inevitable if they persisted in using untrained seamen in the loading of ammunition."

Marshall's questions and his attack on the discriminatory policies of the U.S. Navy were not his alone. The NAACP, the Urban League and liberal elements in President Franklin Roosevelt's administration, as well as those in the wider society, questioned the propriety of Jim Crow practices in the military. Similarly, they questioned the results of the related investigation into the cause of the explosion, an investigation that concluded, in part, that "the consensus of opinion of the witnesses--and practically admitted by the interested parties--is that the colored enlisted personnel are neither temperamentally nor intellectually capable of handling high explosives."

Marshall eventually took his appeal all the way to the Pentagon, claiming that the black sailors had been made scapegoats for the incompetence of Port Chicago's commanding officers. In an immediate sense, his appeal was in vain: The Navy refused to release the men until after the war ended, when they were granted a general amnesty. Their mutiny convictions, however, still stood.

But the sailors' work stoppage and Marshall's efforts on their behalf were far from fruitless over the long term. ironically, the Port Chicago case was the impetus for changes in the U.S. Navy. Less than a year after the Port Chicago incident, the Navy desegregated training facilities, and it followed this action with the desegregation of its shore facilities and ships. The Navy also instituted new training and safety procedures for ammunition handling. And for the first time, the Navy assigned white sailors at Port Chicago to handle ammunition.

The Port Chicago defendants, however, were hardly able to appreciate the relationship between these changes and their action. All they knew was that they had been legally branded as cowards and traitors--just as two decades later civil rights activists would be legally branded as criminals in Southern courts. Fifty years ago, these men were convicted of mutiny. Fifty years later, these convictions still stand.

Following the publication in 1989 of The Port Chicago Mutiny: The Story of the Largest Mass Mutiny Trial in U.S. Naval History (Amistad, 1993), by Robert L. Allen, and the 1990 television documentary based on the book that aired on San Francisco's KRON-TV, members of California's delegation to the U.S. Congress requested the secretary of the Navy to review the 1944 verdicts in the case. Representatives George Miller, whose district includes Port Chicago; Ron Dellums, who is now the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee; Fortney "Pete" Stark; and Don Edwards argued in their letter to the secretary that new information and increased sensitivity surrounding the racial policies of the Navy during World War II justified a reappraisal of the verdicts.

The secretary rejected the congressmen's petition on the grounds that the Uniform Code of Military Justice allowed only a one-year period following judgment for review of World War II court-martial cases. He suggested that the surviving men individually apply for pardons--pardons that would forgive the "guilty" rather than overturn the disputed verdicts. In 1991, the Congress returned to this matter, with resolutions passed by both houses calling for the cases to be reviewed.

Finally, in 1994, two Navy departments--the Board of Correction of Naval Records and the Judge Advocate General of the Navy--issued their findings. Acknowledging that racism did exist in the Navy at the time of the Port Chicago incident and that "racial prejudice was responsible for the posting of African-American enlisted personnel to the loading divisions at Port Chicago," the U.S. Navy concluded that "there was nothing unfair or unjust in the final outcome of any of the Port Chicago courts-martial."

Robert L. Allen, the author of The Port Chicago Mutiny, is the senior editor of the Black Scholar in Oakland, Calif.

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