Though trained for combat, Black sailors did not serve in fighting roles aboard warships; instead, at Port Chicago they were relegated to manual labor under the supervision of White officers. Neither the sailors nor their officers were trained for safety; speed was the imperative in loading the ships. Observers from the longshoremen union expressed concerns about the dangers they witnessed and even offered to demonstrate their own safety protocols after suggesting that a catastrophe was likely. They were ignored.
When the predicted catastrophe hit, the explosions had the force of 5,000 tons of TNT and were felt some 25 miles away in San Francisco. Nearly two-thirds of the dead were African American. Hundreds more were injured. The precise cause of the explosions was never determined.
In the aftermath, surviving sailors refused to return to work because of the dangerous conditions. Threatened with severe punishment — including execution — 208 capitulated. The 50 holdouts were charged with mutiny and the rest with disobeying orders, and all bore the stain of court-martial convictions for the rest of their lives.
Finally, they have received justice.
With the stroke of a pen on July 17, Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro fully exonerated the sailors charged in the incident. In doing so, Del Toro built on efforts in Congress and by some of his predecessors to address the injustice done to brave men who were only trying to reduce the risk of another disaster. However, prior reviews applied legal standards that were found to have been overly deferential to the original trial findings. In fact, those proceedings were flawed — as shown through the hard work of a diligent team of U.S. Navy lawyers and historians. The secretary added, in no small measure, his own energy and leadership to get the job done.
The story of the Port Chicago sailors starts well before the explosions. Like countless Americans of the era, these men enlisted out of a sense of duty, but they bore the knowledge that their love of country would not be reciprocated. Rather than seeing combat under the Stars and Stripes, they would be tasked with menial work because of their race. And they would not be surprised to find that their safety was an afterthought.
White officers who survived the explosions were promptly issued hardship leaves, but the Black survivors were immediately assigned the gruesome job of cleaning up the site. They were eventually ordered to resume loading ships at the Mare Island ammunition depot in nearby Vallejo, Calif. After learning that their requested safety training and protocols would not be granted, they refused the new assignment, with consequences for the rest of their lives.
A future justice of the Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall, appealed the court-martial convictions in his role as lead counsel to the NAACP. First lady Eleanor Roosevelt supported his efforts, but those efforts failed. We write in their honor as proud descendants. The Navy’s exoneration order is a moving example of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s well-known observation: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Read More: Opinion | Exoneration for the Port Chicago 50 and other explosion survivors