Port Chicago Disaster
Floor Speech
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Mr. Speaker, I rise today, along with my colleagues from the Congressional Black Caucus, to talk today to the American people about the tragedy of Port Chicago, California, and the injustice that marked the lives of 50 African American sailors in 1944 and continues to mark every American today.
On my right is an overview of where the facility is. It is still an existing Naval facility--or a Department of Defense facility--an important deepwater port that allows for munitions to go to strategic assets in the Pacific.
This is the map of the bay area. You can see it is in the Sacramento delta, as the delta comes into the San Francisco Bay. The photograph is an aerial photograph, obviously, of how the facility looked in 1944. You can see where the trains came in and put the boxcars into sidings that had concrete on either side to protect people from explosions, and then you can see where the ships docked.
In this photograph, there is one ship docked. On the night that we will talk about, there were two ships loaded. In continuously operated shifts, those ships were loaded, as witnesses would say, in a manner that sacrificed safety in order for expedience.
The fateful, moonless night on Monday, July 17, 1944, was clear and cool. A slight breeze was blowing from the southwest. Two cargo ships were tied up at the pier, Port Chicago pier. Under floodlights, work was proceeding at full speed, all hours.
Shortly after 10:18 p.m., disaster struck. This is how the day of the explosion is described by Dr. Robert Allen in his book, titled ``The Port Chicago Mutiny.''
The deadliest homefront disaster of World War II occurred at Port Chicago Naval Magazine, a major ammunitions facility in my district in northern California.
The shipyard site was 2 miles from a little community of Port Chicago, population 1,500. In those days, the greater area was largely wheat fields and had a very small population of under 50,000. The area currently has a population of over 600,000.
Indicative of the discriminatory practices at the time, all of the enlisted men loading ammunition at the site were African American, whereas all of their officers were Caucasian. The explosion killed or wounded 710 people, 435 of whom were African American.
They had no formal training in safe methods of ammunition or explosives handling given to any of the enlisted men. The Navy failed to adequately provide these enlisted men with the tools necessary to be able to operate under safe working conditions, even after the tragedy struck.
When the surviving 258 African American sailors who, understandably, refused to return to work in these deplorable conditions following the explosion, 50 were charged with mutiny and convicted.
During this time, we seek to bring attention to the systemic racial discrimination suffered by these sailors while on duty, in order to bring perspective to the ongoing discrimination against people of color as we enter into the weekend which will note the 71st anniversary of this tragedy.
Prior to the explosion, many officers at Port Chicago had no previous training either or experience in ship-loading, handling ammunition, or commanding enlisted men. Many of them were reservists. They were called to Active Duty from civilian life and given little or no training. They had to, as they said, learn by doing.
Black enlisted men were also untrained. While they were very aware of the inherent danger of their jobs, these African Americans coped by discounting the risks, much by humor.
Weeks before the explosion, the longshoremen's union of San Francisco warned the Navy that there would be disaster at Port Chicago if the Navy continued to use untrained seamen to load ammunition.
The longshoremen's union was doing similar work in either ports on the West Coast and knew how to load these dangerous materials safely and did not sacrifice safety for speed. The union offered to send experienced longshoremen to train Navy recruits in the safe handling of ammunition, but this offer was ignored by the Navy.
Existing policy required the Coast Guard to provide a detail to ensure that safe handling procedures were followed. Navy commanders believed that this was unnecessary and would create confusion and disrupt loading.
When the Coast Guard tried to oversee operations, it rejected the Navy's common practice, including the practice of moving bombs by rolling and dropping them into place in the ship's hold. Alternative methods offered by the Coast Guard were considered ``ridiculous'' by the Navy and ignored.
In addition, sailors were encouraged to compete against each other to load as much ammunition as possible into the ship, and officers placed nightly bets among themselves as to which division would load more and then pursued their individual enlisted men to make sure that they would win bets as small as $5.
During the environment of this whole period, 8-day work periods were what were allowed by the Navy. You would have 6 days of loading ammunition, with a sleep break, and with meals and short rest periods; then after the sixth day, you would have what was called a duty day, which you would do duty around the facility. You had 1 day of liberty.
Now, this, at that time, was a very remote facility and was a long way from Oakland, the nearest major city; but many of the enlisted men made that trip anyway and went back to work very exhausted.
Aside from the petty officers, all the officers at Port Chicago were white. Commanding officers believed Black enlisted men were a major problem rather than an asset.
Captain Nelson Goss, the commanding officer of Mare Island, of which Port Chicago was a subcommand, said the Black recruits ``arrived with a chip on their shoulder, if not, indeed, one on each shoulder.''
In actuality, these recruits joined the military to defend their country and to fight, if necessary, and put themselves in harm's way overseas. Captain Goss also complained that they were poor workers, capable of only 60 percent of the work compared to White workers.
In turn, Black men resented, obviously, that only they were assigned to essential labor battalions charged with doing dangerous work. They were distressed that they could not receive the rating and promotions that they thought they deserved. For men working under these precarious conditions, the situation amounted to a new form of slavery.
A worker described Port Chicago as a ``slave outfit,'' adding that, ``We were considered a cheap labor force from the beginning.'' They believed their lives were worth less. They were treated as if their lives were worth less, just as their work and abilities were valued less.
A group of men drafted a letter in 1943 setting their grievances and pointing out that the morale among the enlisted men at Port Chicago had dropped to an ``alarming depth.''
On the evening of 17th, two ships--as I said, the E.A. Bryan and the Quinault Victory--the Quinault Victory was a brand-new ship that was about to embark on its maiden voyage--were both in port being loaded. The E.A. Bryan was almost fully loaded as they entered into the graveyard shift.
In the enlisted men's barracks a short distance away, it was quiet. Many men were in their bunks when suddenly an unbelievable explosion occurred shortly after 10:18 p.m.
Survivors in Oakland and San Francisco still remember the explosion from 20 and 35 miles away. People in the nearby rural communities continue to remember this explosion the way survivors of the earthquake in San Francisco did for many years after.
The E.A. Bryan was loaded that night with 4,600 tons of ammunition and high explosives. Bombs weighing 650 pounds each and with their activating mechanisms, or fuses, fully installed were being loaded one at a time.
The dock and the ship had disappeared after the explosion. The E.A. Bryan was eviscerated. Very few pieces were found of this large ship. The Quinault Victory was lifted clear out of the water in an instant by the blast, turned over, and broken into pieces, with very little of it remaining. The 1,200-foot-long wooden pier simply disappeared.
This is the day after the explosion, and this is what was left of the pier.
During the evening, the accounts talk about people in the barracks being completely in black because all the electricity went out. Not knowing what had happened, not knowing what had happened to their colleagues down at the pier, many of them thought they were under attack by the Japanese.
I have one account from Jack Critten, who was a guard on duty that night. ``The barracks had a lot of windows, lower and upper deck, whole side was windows.'' This is a distance away from this site. ``And they were blown to pieces. Some guys lost their sight; others were badly cut. Finally, they got the emergency lights together. Then some guys came by in a truck. And we went down to the dock, but when we got there, we didn't see no dock, no ship, no nothing,'' just darkness.
Everyone onboard the two ships and the fire barge were killed instantly: 320 men, 202 of whom were African American. Another 390 military personnel and civilians were injured, including 233 Black enlisted men.
This single stunning disaster accounted for more than 15 percent of all Black naval casualties during World War II. Property damage, military and civilian, was estimated at that time at more than $12 million.
Again, Mr. Critten recounted, ``You'd see a shoe with a foot in it, and then you would remember how you'd joked about who was gonna be the first one out of the hold if something went wrong. You'd see a head floating across the water--just the head--or an arm, bodies. Just awful.''
Four Port Chicago seamen and one Black enlisted man were awarded medals for their heroic conduct in fighting the ammunition boxcar fire and subsequent fires that broke out that evening after the explosion.
A proposal was presented in Congress to grant families up to $5,000 in compensation for the loss of their loved ones. However, when Mississippi Representative John Rankin objected to the plan because most of the beneficiaries would be Black, Congress reduced the maximum allowable grant to $3,000.
Four days after the explosion, a Naval Court of Inquiry convened on Mare Island to inquire into the circumstances of the explosion.
Captain Nelson Goss admitted that a port director had previously warned him that, ``Conditions are bad up there. You've got to do something about it. If you aren't careful, something's going to happen, and you'll be held responsible for it.''
The judge advocate of the inquiry concluded by addressing the question of the role of Black enlisted personnel in his official inquiry: ``The consensus of opinion of the witness--and practically admitted by the interested parties--is that the colored enlisted personnel are neither temperamentally or intellectually capable of handling high explosives.''
In short, they blamed the victims because they were African American.
During the weeks after and the days after, the men obviously were in a state of shock, troubled by the vivid memory of the horrible explosion in which so many of their friends had died and so many of them had believed would come to bear and then, unfortunately, saw the tragedy worse than they could imagine.
``Everybody was scared,'' one survivor recalled. ``If someone dropped a box or slammed a door, people began jumping around like crazy.''
Many of the Black survivors expected to be granted survivor's leave, as was the custom at the time in the Navy, to visit their families before being reassigned to regular duty.
They waited and waited to get these 30 days off to go visit friends and to start to process what they had seen before they would come back to regular duty, which they were happy to do.
Such leaves were not granted. Even men who had been hospitalized were not granted leaves. All men were to be sent back to work loading ammunition under the same officers before. However, White officers were allowed to go home for 30-day leaves, all of them.
You can see why, under these circumstances and given the tragedy, many of the enlisted African American survivors at Port Chicago were upset in the 3 weeks after the explosion.
They continued to be treated as they were treated before the explosion in spite of their warnings, the warnings of the professionals in the longshoremen union, and the United States Coast Guard.
So some weeks later the men were sent back to Mare Island, a short distance away from where Port Chicago is, across the strait, where munition ships were again being loaded for the war effort, an important job.
As the men marched to go back to work 3 weeks after the incident, they still did not know where they were going as they marched.
But they did know that, at a certain juncture in the road, they could be ordered to turn right, which would take them to the parade ground, or they could be ordered to turn left, which would take them to a ferry that crossed the river to the ammunition loading dock, where they would inevitably resume doing the same work they had done before.
There was a young enlisted man from New Jersey who had natural leadership qualities, who we will hear about shortly, enlisted man Small.
He actually directed the cadence as they walked back. And he described what happened next as he delivered the cadence and he marched his division back towards the pier:
``I was marching on the left-hand side of the ranks. When the lieutenant gave the command `column left,' everybody stopped dead, boom, just like that. He said, `Forward march, column left.' Nobody moved.''
An officer asked Small, ``Small, are you going to go back to work?'' He answered, ``No, sir.'' The officer asked why. And he said, ``I am afraid.''
Seen as a leader among the men, others refused to work when he refused to go back. Someone over in the ranks said, ``If Small don't go, we're not going either.''
Mr. Speaker, 328 followed enlisted member Small and refused to return to work at that moment. 258 were imprisoned as a result. And shortly thereafter 50 were charged with conspiring to make mutiny.
The trial commenced on Treasure Island shortly thereafter. If these 50 were convicted of the charge, the men faced prison terms of 15 years or death.
Mutiny was defined by the defense as ``unlawful opposition or resistance to or defiance of superior military authority with a deliberate purpose to usurp, subvert, or override the same.''
Mutiny was defined by the prosecution as ``collective insubordination. Collective disobedience of lawful orders of a superior. A conspiracy to disobey lawful orders of a superior is mutiny'' as opposed to what we described.
One sailor stated that, ``We didn't know you could define disobeying orders as being mutiny. We thought mutiny could only happen on a ship.''
A refusal to work is a passive act of resistance, without intent to seize power. A mutiny, on the other hand, is an active revolt with the intent of taking charge.
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