“Won’t concussion blow this thing up?” Small asked.
“Impossible,” said Delucchi, pointing again to the diagram.
Once the bombs and crates of smaller ammunition made it down to the pier, the men rolled or lifted everything into nets. Each net was attached to a crane, which could be lifted by a motorized winch. Pulling levers in the winch, the winch operator lifted the sagging net into the air, guided it over the open hold of the ship, and lowered it down into the hold.
The crew in the hold unloaded the ammo in the ship. “You’d build yourself all the way up,” one sailor explained, “just packing until you found yourself way up on top.” After the first day of loading, the team would be working on top of a layer of bombs. They continued stacking explosives higher and higher until they reached the top of the hold.
At the very top, they loaded the “hot cargo,” as the men called it—650-pound incendiary bombs. Unlike the other explosives stacked in the ship, these had their fuses already attached.
The men at Port Chicago described the scene on the loading pier as frantic, stressful, loud, chaotic—bombs rolling and clanking together, winch engines chugging and smoking, nets swinging through the air, sailors shouting and cursing, officers urging the men on.
“We were all afraid of an explosion,” Small later said. “But there was very little that you could do about it. I mean, you had a day’s work to do.”
* * *
At first Joe Small worked on the pier, loading bombs with the rest of his crew. But he was fascinated by the winch operator job, mainly because it was the only work on the dock that required any skill. While the others were finishing lunch, he’d slip off to sit in the machine, practicing with the levers. Drawing on years of experience as a truck driver, he soon learned how to handle the winch.
A winch is loaded before lifting heavy bombs over the high sides of a ship.
One day, one of the Division Four winch drivers had to leave for a medical emergency.
“Hey!” someone on the pier called out. “Where’s the winchman?”
Small stepped up. “I’ll run it while he’s gone.”
He sat down, grabbed the levers, and got to work.
“So whenever they needed a replacement, they called on me,” Small recalled. “And eventually, I took over the job completely.”
That was typical Joe Small. Others in the division saw Small’s skill and boldness, and responded to it.
“He should have been anything but what they had him doing,” said a fellow sailor, expressing the common opinion in Division Four that Small should have been promoted to a position of more authority. “They just disregarded black people.”
The men thought Small should at least be made a petty officer, the highest rank given to black sailors at Port Chicago. Lieutenant Delucchi told Small he had the ability for the job, but was still too young.
Small didn’t get the promotion, or the private room and extra pay that went with it. But he got the responsibility, anyway. When Delucchi had a message to relay to the division, he went to Small instead of the division’s petty officer. When the men had a question or complaint they wanted presented to Delucchi, they went to Small.
“Look, you got a petty officer,” Small used to tell the men. “You got to talk to your petty officer.”
The men would curse the petty officer, say he didn’t know anything, didn’t have the guts to speak up to the white officers. So Small would give in and help.
“And that just put me in deeper,” he later said. He hadn’t asked for the extra work, and didn’t especially want it. “But I’ve never been one to shirk,” he said. “Once I commit myself, I’ll go through with it.”
* * *
Each division worked an eight-hour shift, and then headed back to the barracks while another took over. Bright lights lit the pier at night, and the loading continued nonstop, twenty-four hours a day.
The men’s lives were divided into eight-day segments. Three days of loading, then a “duty day”—laundry and other jobs around base—three more days of loading, then a day of liberty.
Like all the young sailors, Small treasured the chance to jump on a bus and get away from the base for a few hours, drink a beer in peace, maybe meet a girl. There was a town named Port Chicago about a mile from base, but it didn’t have much to offer.
“It was just a one-street place,” Robert Routh remembered; a few restaurants, a movie theater. “They didn’t want blacks there at all. The townspeople didn’t care for blacks.”
The nearest place with any sort of nightlife was Pittsburg, but the city had only one street with bars at which black customers were welcome. When they got off the bus in Pittsburg, the Port Chicago sailors were expected to walk a specific five-block route through a white neighborhood, a maddening maze of turns, to reach the “permitted” Black Diamond Street.
“Other streets we were found on, we were accosted,” Small remembered. “We had to answer questions as to why we weren’t where we were supposed to be.”
The fact that these men were wearing the uniform of the United States Navy made no difference.
Most of the men preferred to head for the big cities of Oakland or San Francisco, though it meant a longer bus ride. One liberty day, riding a bus for Oakland, Robert Edwards struck up a friendly conversation with two white sailors headed the same way.
“Let’s go over to the bar and have us a drink,” one of the sailors said when the bus reached the station.
The men walked into a nearby joint and ordered three bottles of beer. The bartender set two bottles on the bar.
“What happened to my friend’s beer?” asked one of the white sailors. “Aren’t you going to give him a beer?”
The bartender said, “We don’t serve niggers here.”
Edwards turned and walked out alone. He got on a bus and headed back to Port Chicago.
“We’re supposed to be fighting the same enemy,” he thought. “I don’t know who my enemy really is.”
After that, he spent his liberty days on base, in his bunk with a novel.
When he’d joined the Navy, people told him, “You’re fighting for your freedom!”
Now he wondered: “Where’s the freedom?”
THE LAWYER
ROBERT EDWARDS’S EXPERIENCE was far from unique in World War II America.
Black newspapers received a steady stream of letters from African American soldiers and sailors describing the lousy treatment they were getting in the military.
“Here on the post we’re treated like dogs,” wrote one soldier from a segregated base in Colorado. He described lining up outside the chow hall with the other black soldiers, and being ordered to wait until the white men finished eating—and then being served cold leftovers.
Another soldier wrote from an Alabama base, where the movie theater had five seats reserved “for colored.” If more than five black men wanted to see the film, they were out of luck. At a base in Georgia, black soldiers were woken up an hour before white soldiers—to clean the toilets in the white barracks.
At the Tuskegee Air Field in Alabama, the Army was training the country’s first group of African American fighter pilots. It was an important step forward, yet even there, black pilots were confronted with “white” and “colored” signs over the toilets.
Segregation was even crueler in the towns near military bases, especially in the South. In a letter to Yank, a weekly newspaper written by American soldiers, Corporal Rupert Trimmingham described a scene that became famous as a symbol of the hypocrisy of segregation in an army that was fighting for freedom around the world.
Trimmingham was traveling to a new base with a group of black soldiers. Their train stopped in a small Louisiana town, and the next train didn’t leave until morning. The men walked into town and tried to buy a meal. Not a single restaurant would serve them.
Finally, the lunchroom in the train station agreed to feed them—but only if they’d come around to the back entrance and eat, s
tanding up, in the kitchen.
To Trimmingham this was galling enough. Then came the bigger slap.
About two dozen German prisoners of war, guarded by two white American soldiers, entered the station. Trimmingham stood outside, watching in shock through the window. The enemy prisoners walked into the lunchroom, took tables, and were served right away. They ate and talked, laughed and smoked cigarettes.
Thurgood Marshall
“Are these men sworn enemies of this country? Why are they treated better than we are?” Trimmingham challenged. “If we are to die for our country, then why does the government allow such things to go on?”
* * *
No single lawyer could possibly handle the avalanche of abuses reported by African American soldiers and sailors. But Thurgood Marshall was willing to try.
Six foot two and slim, with a thin mustache, Marshall was the lead attorney for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), an important civil rights organization based in New York City. Founded in 1909, the NAACP was dedicated to the struggle for equal rights and opportunities for African Americans. At just thirty-four, Thurgood Marshall was already known as one of the best civil rights lawyers in the country. When black servicemen needed help, Marshall was the man they turned to.
“I gave them someplace they could come,” he later said. “If it got real rough, I’d be there.”
The desk in Marshall’s Manhattan office was cluttered with ever-growing piles of letters and articles describing stories like Trimmingham’s—and worse. In late 1943, to take a typical example, a black army private named Rieves Bell was standing on a street corner in a Mississippi town, chatting with a couple of women. Four white civilians strode up.
One pushed Bell. He ignored it and went on talking with the women.
A second man shoved Bell, snarling, “Where’d you get that uniform?”
From Uncle Sam, Bell said.
“Take off that soldier suit.”
Bell refused. Two of the men grabbed Bell, and the others began punching and kicking him. The police drove up and stopped the fight. The only man they arrested was Private Bell. He was charged with assault, found guilty, and sentenced to three and a half years in prison.
When Thurgood Marshall heard of cases like these, he collected evidence and sent it to the War Department, demanding the government do more to protect its men in uniform. The response was always the same: segregation was a way of life in much of the country, and the federal government had no intention of interfering in local customs.
This enraged Marshall—but never discouraged him. Marshall saw his work as a fight for justice, and it was deeply personal.
* * *
Thurgood Marshall grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, where the schools, the parks, and even the stores were strictly segregated. There wasn’t a place in all of downtown, Marshall remembered, where a black kid could use the bathroom.
At fifteen, he found an after-school job making deliveries for a clothing store. One afternoon he climbed onto a crowded trolley, holding a stack of hat boxes that rose over his head. Unable to see past the boxes, he bumped into the passenger in front of him.
A hand grabbed Marshall’s shirt collar from behind and yanked him down the trolley steps.
“Don’t push in front of a white lady!” the white man shouted.
“Damn it,” Marshall barked back, “I’m just trying to get on the damned bus.”
“Nigger, don’t you talk to me like that!”
Marshall’s mind raced to something his father told him often: “Anyone calls you a nigger, you not only got my permission to fight him—you got my orders to fight him.”
The teenager dropped the hats and started swinging his skinny arms in wild windmill punches. The man drove his head into Marshall’s stomach, and the two fell to the sidewalk, tumbling and gouging. A policeman pushed through the gathering crowd and pulled the fighters apart. Only Marshall was arrested.
When his boss came down to the station to get him out, Marshall apologized for the ruined hats.
The elderly Jewish man put his arm around Marshall’s shoulder and said, “It was worth it, if you’re right.”
After that Marshall never stopped fighting, though his teachers helped him find more effective tools than fists. Whenever he got in trouble in school, which, he confessed, was often, he was sent to the basement with a copy of the United States Constitution, and not let out until he memorized a passage. “Before I left that school I knew the whole thing by heart,” Marshall said.
In those basement study sessions, Marshall was stunned to discover that the Constitution guaranteed the same basic rights to all Americans, regardless of race. Of particular interest was the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, which specifically forbids states from denying any citizen “equal protection of the laws.”
Segregation was not only immoral, Marshall realized, it was unconstitutional. He decided to become a lawyer and prove it in court.
* * *
Marshall worked sixteen-hour days during World War II, juggling cases from around the country. He spent most of his time on the road, traveling thousands of miles every month by train, bus, and car, living on adrenaline and too much junk food. With no office to work from, he’d fold his tall frame into the back of a car and tap out legal documents with his typewriter on his lap.
There was no end to the battles calling for Marshall’s attention. He’d take on segregation laws in one town, and then defend falsely accused black prisoners somewhere else. He’d fight for voting rights one week, and the next challenge rules allowing states to pay black teachers less than whites.
And there was the long line of African American soldiers and sailors in need of help.
Lieutenant Nora Green, for example, was an Army nurse at the Tuskegee training base in Alabama. While shopping in nearby Montgomery, she got on a public bus, paid her fare, and sat. The driver told her to get off and wait outside while all the white passengers at the bus stop got on first.
Green refused to move. The driver cursed at her and called the police, who came and told her to get off the bus. She explained that she was due back on base for duty. The officers picked Green up, hit her, and dragged her to jail. She was let out the next morning—after paying a fine.
Green notified the NAACP, and the NAACP protested to the War Department and the Department of Justice. Rather than addressing the injustice, the government ordered Green to stop talking about the incident.
There were many similar cases, and some turned truly violent. Private Edward Green boarded a bus near his Louisiana base, and found a seat. The driver ordered Green to move back—he was sitting in a “white only” row. Green told the driver he’d sooner get off the bus than change seats. The bus stopped. The men exchanged hostile words as the soldier got off. The driver followed Green down the street, pulled out a pistol, and killed him.
The state declined to prosecute the driver. The Justice Department refused to investigate. The driver kept right on driving his route, with his murder weapon by his seat.
Stories like these didn’t make the pages of mainstream newspapers, but they were reported in black newspapers. And all over the country—including at Port Chicago—black soldiers and sailors read the stories and wondered why the government was allowing such injustice to go unpunished.
“I hope you can realize the effect on the morale of the Negro soldiers,” Marshall wrote to the Justice Department, protesting their lack of action in the Edward Green case. “Although one of their members is killed without provocation, the same government for which they are fighting refuses to take any action whatsoever to prosecute the guilty party.”
Both civilian and military leaders hid behind the same old argument. Segregation was a fact of life, they said, and trying to force a change would upset white communities and white soldiers. “The urgency of the war situation does not justify experimentation,” explained one general.
Marshall fought on. But he could f
eel the frustration and anger growing.
“Negro soldiers are damned tired of the treatment they are getting,” reported a black army chaplain in 1944. “It grows out of the un-American treatment which plagues his every day, while at the same time having to listen to loud voices telling him what a great honor it is to die for his country.”
“Things are slowly coming to a head,” warned a black sailor from a base in Virginia. “All it needs is a little incident to light the fuse.”
HOT CARGO
IN APRIL 1944, Captain Merrill T. Kinne took over command of Port Chicago. Kinne’s job was to keep the ammunition moving from trains to ships as quickly as possible.
Kinne came into the job with the common prejudices against black sailors. “I have never felt that it would be possible to maintain a satisfactory loading rate with the type of enlisted personnel assigned to Port Chicago,” he told his officers, “unless every officer in a supervisory capacity keeps continually in mind the necessity for getting this ammunition out.”
Kinne’s solution was to promote competition by posting the daily tonnage moved by each division on a chalkboard at the pier. Divisions loading the most were rewarded with free movies.
“It was as fast as you can go,” Percy Robinson said of the pace of work. “It was a challenge.”
“It was pressure,” remembered Albert Williams. “It was a rush, rush.”
An official Navy report would later declare: “Efforts were made by the officers to bring home to the men the necessity for care in the handling of explosives.”
Percy Robinson (bending over) places boxes of ammunition onto a cargo net so that it can be loaded onto a ship.
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