🎥🎞🎬📽 Preview: PORT CHICAGO EXPLOSION 80TH YEAR and the PORT CHICAGO 50 Continuous Fight for Exoneration

.Historical photo of Black sailors in the U.S. Navy during marching drill at Port Chicago Naval Magazine near San Francisco, California. On the night of July 17, 1944, two explosions killed 320 sailors, 202 of whom were Black Americans. Another 390 individuals were injured while only 51 of the deceased were identified, according to Navy records (Photo by the NAVY/NATIONAL PARK SERVICE).

#PortChicago #PortChicago50 #USNavy #WWII #WorldWarII #ThurgoodMarshall #NAACP #FreddieMeeks #SacramentoKings #LasVegas

.PORT CHICAGO, Calif.

. Photo presented by the NATIONAL PARK SERVICE.

National Park Service Presents the Eighth Decade of a Deadly Explosion That Killed 202 Black Americans, Court Marshall of 50 Men, and the End of Military Segregation

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Text BY T. Ray Harvey | PA Public Information Officer

Photo Art supplied by the

The United States Naval History and Heritage Command

and

THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Port Chicago, Calif. — The 80th commemoration of the Port Chicago Naval Magazine explosion where over half the sailors who perished in the catastrophic event were Black will be held at the Military Ocean Terminal Concord (MOTCO) on July 20.

In collaboration with the National Park Service (NPS), Friends of Port Chicago National Memorial, and the U.S. Army’s 834th Transportation Battalion, The celebratory event provides an opportunity for friends, family, journalists, and others interested in a disaster that historically led to a work stoppage and the largest mutiny trial in U.S. naval history.

Civil rights legend Rev. Amos C. Brown, the President of the San Francisco Branch of the NAACP and senior pastor of the Third Baptist Church of San Francisco continues to seek justice for the men who died in the blast and the survivors who later were accused of rebellion.

“It was nothing but another instance of forces in America being perpetrators of hate, harm, and hardship of Black folks,” Brown said of tragedy and the injustice that followed. “But it was a fairly unknown Black, civil rights attorney, who put the light on this issue of systemic racism in the Arm forces. These Black men who died in that blowup several miles from San Francisco should never be forgotten.”

Black sailors packaging munitions at Port Chicago Naval Magazine, circa 1944 (NAVY/NATIONAL PARK SERVICE).

Jake Sloan, who lives in Oakland, has a wealth of knowledge of shipyards around the San Francisco Bay, where many African Americans drifted to the area for employment during the Great Migration from the Deep South states to California. The blast in Port Chicago killed 202 Black sailors who were loading bombs onto two Navy ships during World War II.

Sloan, the author of “Standing Tall: Willie Long vs. U.S. Government at Mare Island Naval Shipyard,” attended the 75th commemoration of Port Chicago at MOTCO. Just standing on the grounds where the explosion occurred was a surreal feeling, Sloan said.

“It was quite an event. It was exciting in a way and sad in another way,” Sloan told California Black Media (CBM) of his experience at the monument site. “I actually walked through the site in addition to attending the ceremony. If you’re an African American, and if you know the story, you can almost feel it.”

Located 35 miles northeast of San Francisco, the Port Chicago pier was built in 1942. Within two years the pier was improved and expanded to accommodate space for the loading of two naval cargo ships during wartime.

At a time when all military branches were racially segregated, African-American Navy personnel units, trained for combat, were assigned to Port Chicago, working under dangerous conditions and improperly trained to handle destructive devices.

“They called them sailors but all of them worked in service outfits,” Sloan said. “If they weren’t loading or unloading dangerous ammunition, they worked as servants. Basically, in the mess hall in food preparation. They were there for domestic support.”

Sloan penned a book that tells the story of over 1,000 African American workers – less than 3% of Mare Island Navy Shipyards’ workforce – who were met with racial discrimination in working conditions, unequal pay, hiring, training, and advancement. Twenty-five men filed a complaint against long-entrenched racial discrimination at Mare Island Naval Shipyard, which was a landing port for submarines. Sloan worked there from 1960 to 1965.

“Yes, I was involved in civil rights activities at Mare Island,” Sloan said. “The long and short end of it is that the story is kind of an extension of what took place 25 miles away at Port Chicago.”

Black sailors at Port Chicago were trained for World War II combat but were delegated to loading and unloading munitions onto cargo ships. White officers commanded the units (NAVY/NATIONAL PARK SERVICE).

On July 17, 1944, 320 cargo handlers, crewmen, and sailors were working in an area where 4,606 tons of ammunition and highly explosive bombs were being loaded on the cargo ships SS Quinault Victory and SS E.A. Bryan, according to information provided by Naval History and Heritage Command (NNHC). An additional 429 tons of explosives were reported sitting in 16 rail cars on the pier.

Around 10:18 p.m., a “seismic shock wave” that started at Port Chicago shook the entire San Francisco Bay and “was felt as far away as Boulder City, Nevada,” NNHC reported. The explosion was so powerful that it decimated both ships, sent debris flying for miles over the Suisun Bay, and hollowed out an extremely large crater in place of the pier.

All 320 men were instantly killed in the blast, 202 of them Black enlisted sailors. Another 390 men were injured from the explosion. “The structures around the (Port Chicago) pier were completely disintegrated,” NNHC detailed in its report.

To this day, it is still unknown how the blast occurred on that warm night in a remote location. Ironically, the African American sailors were unfairly blamed for the explosion, which was later determined to have been an accident likely caused by unsafe working conditions and lack of proper training, according to data provided by NPS.

Navy Personnel in the top right corner observe carnage from the blasts at Port Chicago. The explosions affected many structures (Navy/National Park Service).

Brown also said the African American sailors were unfairly blamed for the explosion, which was later determined to have been an accident likely caused by unsafe working conditions and lack of proper training.

Within days, many of the surviving Black sailors were moved from Port Chicago to Mare Island Naval Ammunition Depot to join units of new young men who lacked experience in loading and unloading weapons of mass destruction, according to the Port Chicago Alliance.

What ensued after the explosion shed more light on how uneven the racial policies were in the Navy. Many of the surviving Black sailors were mentally and physically affected by the tragic incident but were faced with another dilemma that has yet to be resolved to this day.

“In the aftermath, surviving sailors were ordered to resume the same dangerous tasks without any changes to safety protocols,” NPS described on its webpage dedicated to Port Chicago Naval Magazine, which was converted into a National Memorial Park. “On Aug. 9, 1944, 258 African American sailors refused to work, leading to 50 being charged with mutiny.”

PORT CHICAGO 50:

Court Martial, Trial, and Significant Consequences

In correlation with the 80th anniversary of the Port Chicago explosion, on May 22, 2024, U.S. Representative John Garamendi (D-CA-08) insisted that the U.S. Navy reconsider exonerating the 50 Black sailors who lived through the munitions blast, and then court-martialed and convicted of mutiny.

The men were dishonorably discharged for refusing to follow a racially motivated order to clear debris from the area and retrieve sailors’ appendages, many of them who were the survivors’ friends and fellow servicemembers. White officers were given hardship and time off following the accident.

Garamendi has worked with U.S. Representative Mark DeSaulnier (D-CA-10), who represented the site from 2015 until 2023, to seek justice for the Port Chicago 50 and their families.

“The Port Chicago 50 were ordered to their deaths in the summer of 1944, nearly four years before President Truman signed the executive order formally banning racial segregation in the American military,” Garamendi said in a Feb. 17, 2023, written statement. “Now, almost eight decades later and even after President Clinton’s 1999 pardon for Freddie Meeks, the families of the Port Chicago 50 convicted for mutinying against an order that should never have been given are still waiting for justice.”

The trial for the Port Chicago 50 took place at the Treasure Island Naval Magazine in San Francisco. Some of the court hearings were conducted 30 miles away at Mare Island Naval Shipyard. The men were court-martialed for mutiny, refusing to load munitions after the deadly disaster that took 320 lives (Navy/National Park Service).

The court hearings and trials were conducted at Treasure Island Naval Base in San Francisco and 30 miles north at Mare Island Naval Shipyard in Vallejo. Treasure Island, a manmade 404-acre body of land connected to Yerba Buena Island, was a naval base until 1996. In 1936-37 the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers built the island between 1936 and 1937.

Before he successfully argued that “separate but equal” public schools were unconstitutional in 1954, Black attorney Thurgood Marshall and his team provided legal representation for the 50 men when the future first Black U.S. Supreme Court Justice was the chief counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Marshall blamed the Navy’s racial separation system and a hostile environment that devalued and endangered the Black sailors.

“The defense, supported by Marshall, contended that the sailors’ actions were a justified response to unsafe working conditions and racial discrimination,” NPS reported.

According to NPS, the court-martial proceedings occurred from Sept. 14 to Oct. 24, 1944. The military court convicted all 50 Black sailors, sentencing each one from eight to 15 years in prison, despite Marshall’s best litigation efforts.

Due to national and international exposure from the blast and ensuing trial, in 1948 Executive Order 9981 was signed by US President Harry S. Truman. The action effectively desegregated all parts of the Armed Forces.

In December 1999, one of the last living members of the Port Chicago 50 Freddie Meeks received a Presidential pardon from President Bill Clinton. Meeks, passed away on June 19, 2003, at 83 in Los Angeles. Born in Natchez, Mississippi, he was laid to rest at Rose Hill Memorial Park in Whittier, California.

In an Aug. 24, 1980 interview for the University of California-Berkeley’s Port Chicago Oral History Project, Meeks said it was reported that the explosion was a “sabotage” mission. He countered that argument, saying that some of the bombs were handled “lackadaisically” by the soldiers. Many of the bombs had to be rolled on and off the ships, causing them to bump against each other if the sailors on the other end didn’t adequately retrieve them, Meeks said from his perspective.

Freddie Meeks was one of 50 Black sailors accused and convicted of rebellion after the Port Chicago disaster on July 17, 1944. Meeks was the only sailor from the group who petitioned for a pardon, which he received from President Bill Clinton in December 1999. Meeks died at the age of 83 in Los Angeles, Calif., IN 2003 (U.S. Navy Memorial).

“When they slide down in that darn thang you’re supposed to catch ’em. And some days them thangs (bombs) used to hit (against each other). I’ll tell you the truth…me and a lot of us guys were scared to death. Because they were talking about, ‘they don’t have no warheads on them so they won’t explode,’” Meeks told the interviewer Robert Allen.

Meeks continued by saying in a Deep South state dialect, “But to me, I believe they decided that the explosion was by the carelessness of running them darn bombs down the runway, somebody probably didn’t catch one, it hit and probably exploded.”

Meeks also shared that he was on one of the two ships earlier that day. Before heading to the nearby town of Port Chicago, he and his fellow naval mates deboarded the ship, turned around, and waved back at the crew onboard that relieved them from duty.

“That was the last we saw them alive,” Meeks told Allen of the men on the ships who died in the blast.

As the top member of the Subcommittee on Readiness since 2019, Garamendi added key provisions to the “National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2025” to support the cleanup of Mare Island and justice for the Port Chicago 50.

On Feb. 23, 2023, US Representatives Garamendi, DeSaulnier, and Barbara Lee (D-CA-12), presented a House Resolution, Recognizing the victims of the Port Chicago explosion and the clearing of 50 African-American sailors’ name of an unjustly court-martialed by the Navy.

Port Chicago (A) Naval Magazine is located 35 miles northeast of San Francisco. The sailors were loading munitions into two naval cargo ships -SS EA Bryan and SS Quinault Victory -- at the pier when the explosions occurred on July 17, 1944.

“These 50 courageous sailors have suffered the impact of racial discrimination throughout their service in World War II, and their names have been tainted for 73 years,” Lee said in a February 2023 written statement. “In today’s political climate, we must come together against discrimination and inequality. It is imperative that we rectify this wrongdoing and bring justice to those sailors who made great sacrifices for our nation.”

Mare Island was registered as a California Historical Landmark in 1960 and declared a national monument in 1975. Established in 1997, Touro University California, sits on a 44-acre campus within the historic Mare Island Naval Base.

In 1992, a memorial was erected at the site of the Port Chicago disaster. The Friends of Port Chicago pushed to establish the marker and the advocates remain the national park’s collaborators. The park is strictly accessible by making reservations in advance.

Four years before his passing, Meeks told the New York Times why he and the other 49 Black sailors served their country, fought to clear their names, and stood up for equality.

“The lesson is we stood up for our rights,” Meeks said at Los Angeles home, a day after receiving a pardon in December 199. “We stood up to get the same rights the whites had. We all should have been treated the same because we were all in the Navy and were going to fight for the same purpose. But they thought we should do the dirty work.”

.Left, Historical photo loading a naval ship at Port Chicago Naval Magazine near San Francisco, California. Center, On the night of July 17, 1944, two explosions destroyed the Port Chicago pier and two ships docked at the location. Right, The site where the pier was located was constructed into a national memorial for visitors (Photo by the NAVY/NATIONAL PARK SERVICE).