I asked a couple of people whether they knew the story of the US Navy exonerating 256 black sailors who were punished in 1944. It’s not as well known as I thought.
This Smithsonian story from 2022 sets the table. A Deadly World War II Explosion Sparked Black Soldiers to Fight for Equal Treatment. “At the U.S. Navy ammunition depot at Port Chicago, on Suisun Bay some 36 miles northeast of San Francisco, Black seamen worked in shifts around the clock loading ships bound for the Pacific. Every day, they transferred hundreds of tons of bombs and shells from railroad boxcars to the ships. Sometimes, the bombs were wedged so snugly in the boxcars that the sailors struggled to loosen them safely. It was dangerous work; shortly after 10 p.m. on July 17, 1944, it proved deadly…
“All the people on the pier, aboard the two naval ships, and on a nearby Coast Guard fire barge were killed instantly. Three hundred and twenty people died, including 202 Black enlisted sailors. Only 51 bodies were recovered. It was the worst home-front disaster of the war.”
Tragedy compounded
Tragic, yes. And yet, it got worse. “Four days after the explosion… the Navy began its investigation. Three senior officers and a judge advocate interviewed 125 witnesses over a month, only five of whom were Black sailors. The officers … pointed their fingers at the enlisted men. ‘The consensus of opinion of the witnesses…is that the colored enlisted personnel are neither temperamentally or intellectually capable of handling high explosives,’ the judge advocate concluded. ‘It is an admitted fact, supported by the testimony of the witnesses, that there was rough and careless handling of the explosives being loaded aboard ships at Port Chicago.'” This was nonsense.
More than 250 black sailors initially refused to continue to work under these dangerous conditions. Under enormous pressure, “more than 200 men decided to return to work, and the admiral recommended they be charged with summary courts-martial for refusing to obey orders.”
But 50 were held and charged with conspiring to make a mutiny; they were convicted. An NAACP lawyer named Thurgood Marshall took up their appeal, but it was unsuccessful.
However, in July 2024, the Secretary of the Navy announced “the full exoneration of 256 defendants who were court-martialed following the 1944 Port Chicago explosion”. This was one more piece of hidden history, only 80 years later.