The stern of the Quinalt Victory juts from the bay following the explosion.
“Man, it was awful,” Jack Crittenden remembered. “You’d see a head floating across the water—just the head—or an arm.”
“Very seldom you’d find a whole body,” DeWitt Jameson said. “You may find a shoe with a foot in it. Half a head blown off, or something like that. We had to do this for a couple of days, until the authorities felt that we had found everybody that we were going to find.”
A headline that ran in the Shreveport Times on the day following the Port Chicago blast estimated the death toll at 650. The count was later confirmed to be 320.
Of the human remains pulled from the bay, only fifty-one bodies were whole enough to identify. There had been more than 300 people at the waterfront at the time of the blast.
* * *
The morning after the explosion, the Navy let reporters into Port Chicago. The blast was already headline news all over the country.
“As we walked down the streets, we stepped over broken glass, pieces of steel from the exploded ships and debris of all sorts,” wrote one reporter. “On either side were shattered barracks with gaping holes, as though hit by shells. From their windows, shades flapped miserably in the wind.”
Captain Nelson Goss held a brief press conference to discuss the known facts.
Every single person aboard the two ships, and everyone on the pier, had been instantly killed. A total of 320 men were dead, 202 of them black sailors who’d been loading ammunition. Another 390 men, mostly sailors in the barracks, were injured.
A reporter asked if they could have a look at the blast site.
No, Goss said. “We wouldn’t want to go there anyway. It is a terrible thing and not anything you want to write about.”
Someone asked about the cause of the explosion.
“We have no basis for giving any cause,” Goss said, “as there are no close survivors to give evidence of what happened.”
In his own statement to the press, Admiral Carleton Wright, one of the Navy’s top officials on the West Coast, spoke of the vital contribution the victims had made to the war effort. “Their sacrifice could not have been greater had it occurred on a battleship or a beachhead on the war fronts.”
Wright also praised the men of Port Chicago for fighting fires and aiding the wounded in the hectic hours after the blast. “As was to be expected, Negro personnel attached to the Naval Magazine Port Chicago performed bravely and efficiently in the emergency,” he told the papers. “As real Navy men, they simply carried on in the crisis attendant on the explosion in accordance with our Service’s highest traditions.”
* * *
On July 21, four days after the explosion, the Navy convened an official court of inquiry to try to determine the cause of the disaster. One major challenge quickly became apparent—there were no living witnesses. Anyone close enough to have seen how the blast began was dead.
Based on the descriptions of witnesses who were a mile or more away, it was clear there had been two separate explosions. First a smaller one, then, about six seconds later, the massive blast that flattened the base. The smaller explosion must have sparked the bigger one. But what caused the smaller one?
This brought up the issue of the way explosives were being handled. Some of the younger officers testified about Captain Kinne’s policy of posting tonnage figures, which encouraged competition between divisions. Kinne insisted this had absolutely no impact on safety at the pier.
Automobiles parked near the Port Chicago pier were demolished by the blast.
The Navy, in reporting its findings, agreed. “The posting of the amounts loaded by each division did not operate to increase the hazards of loading,” the report concluded. “Unsafe practices and speed at the expense of safety were not permitted by anyone in authority.”
The real problem, insisted many of the officers, was the black sailors.
“The consensus of opinion of the witnesses,” summarized the official report, “is that the colored enlisted personnel are neither temperamentally nor intellectually capable of handling high explosives.… 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.”
When the report used the word witnesses, it was referring exclusively to white officers. Surviving black sailors who had done the loading didn’t have a chance to tell their stories or offer their own opinions. The court never asked them to testify.
* * *
While the Navy began clearing the rubble from Port Chicago, the black sailors were transferred to a nearby base, Camp Shoemaker. The men were not told when they would be put back to work, or what type of work they would be doing.
“We had no idea what was happening,” Joe Small remembered.
Sitting around in the barracks day after idle day, the men talked of the friends they would never see again. “You knew all of these people that got killed,” said Spencer Sikes. “There was a mourning period.”
They traded theories about the cause of the explosion. Percy Robinson, his face and arm wrapped in bandages, was convinced there had been some kind of accident, probably involving the “hot cargo” incendiary bombs.
Several others suspected sabotage—they believed an enemy had snuck on base and somehow triggered the blast.
“I just don’t believe that it was sabotage,” Freddie Meeks argued. “I believe it came from an explosion in one of them boxcars.”
Freddie Meeks
With nothing to do but wait and think and wonder, the men’s already frayed nerves stretched toward the snapping point.
“Everybody was scared,” Robinson remembered. “If somebody dropped a box or slammed a door, people began jumping around like crazy.”
One of the men near Joe Small’s bunk dealt with the fear by making a joke of it. In the middle of the night, he tiptoed to the light switch, flipped on the lights, and yelled, “Fire!”
During another quiet moment in the barracks, Small watched the same guy lift a stiff corner of his bedsheet and jam it into the whirling blades of a fan.
“It made a ‘RRRRR’ noise,” Small recalled. “And there was a spontaneous explosion toward that back door.” The men ripped the door off the hinges as they dove out of the building.
As usual, Small was the one to take the men’s concerns to the officers. “I requested that he be moved out of our barracks,” Small explained. “They moved him out.”
* * *
In Washington, D.C., Congress began considering a bill to compensate the victims of the Port Chicago disaster. As it was first written, the legislation allowed residents of the town of Port Chicago and families of dead servicemen to receive grants of up to $5,000. But John Rankin, a rabidly pro-segregationist House member from Mississippi, objected on the grounds that many of the families getting money would be black.
Congress reduced the maximum compensation to $3,000.
In an editorial titled “Port Chicago Heroes,” the Pittsburgh Courier blasted back at the continuing discrimination against black servicemen. “What did they die for?” the paper asked of the Port Chicago victims. “Why did these heroes risk death?”
A memorial service for the victims of the Port Chicago explosion was held on July 30, 1944.
America was battling for its freedom and way of life in this war, and black servicemen and women were part of the worldwide fight. “Negro Americans rallied even though they knew that the American way for them was something different, and something less, from what it is for the white American.”
Now, two and a half years into World War II, more than 200 black sailors had died in service at the segregated base of Port Chicago. “Ought not this sacrifice,” the paper asked, “touch the conscience of America? Is one to assume, as the nation continues to ask the Negro to die for less than the white American dies, that the national conscience of America is at such a low moral level that most Americans ar
e satisfied that the blood of Negroes is worth less than that of whites?
“At some time, every Negro in the armed services asks himself what he is getting for the supreme sacrifice he is called upon to make.”
* * *
Letters continued to pour into Thurgood Marshall’s New York City office.
In an all-too-typical case, a black army private named Purdie Jackson was severely beaten for refusing to leave the “white only” section of a Nashville, Tennessee, drugstore. The army charged Jackson with assault, court-martialed him, and gave him twelve years in prison. Marshall prepared an appeal on Jackson’s behalf.
Other soldiers and sailors wrote to Marshall describing how they’d been dishonorably discharged from the military for speaking out against racist treatment. Marshall and his three-lawyer staff took on as many of the cases as they could.
It was frustrating work, but Marshall cautioned fellow African Americans against turning bitter or losing hope. As rough as things were in the United States, he argued, they’d be a lot worse under the dictators America was fighting in World War II. The challenge ahead, as Marshall saw it, was to help win the war and to continue pressuring the country to confront segregation.
“We must not be delayed by people who say ‘the time is not ripe,’” Marshall told the crowd at an NAACP conference in July 1944. “Persons who deny to us our civil rights should be brought to justice now. Many people believe the time is always ‘ripe’ to discriminate against Negroes. All right then—the time is always ‘ripe’ to bring them to justice.”
What Marshall could not have known was that he was about to get a chance to take the fight for justice directly to the United States Navy.
* * *
At the beginning of August, Joe Small and the other Port Chicago men were moved to Mare Island Naval Shipyard, a base on San Pablo Bay, in the city of Vallejo. They still didn’t know what the Navy had planned for them. But ships were being loaded with ammunition at Mare Island. That gave them a pretty good idea.
“The only thing we knew was handling ammunition,” Small later said, “and we fully expected to be asked to go back to the same work.”
They’d have preferred any other assignment.
“Put me on a ship and let me fight out there, take my chances there,” one sailor said. “Why lose your life on somebody else’s negligence?”
At some point during that first week of August, a list circulated through the barracks, and many of the men signed it. The sailors later said it was a petition requesting a transfer to some other type of duty. The Navy would insist it was a list of people who intended to refuse to load ammunition. We’ll never know, because the list disappeared.
“I was instrumental in having it destroyed,” Small explained years later. Some serious decisions were coming up, he knew, and it was best to put nothing in writing. “When you put your name on a list, then you become a supporting part of whatever that list stands for,” Small explained. “And there’s very little chance of your changing your mind even if you wanted to.”
On August 8, the men of Small’s division were issued new work gloves—the same types of gloves they had used on the pier at Port Chicago.
“If these are for handling ammunition,” joked one of the sailors, “I never touch the stuff.”
But he took the gloves. They all did.
The Navy would later charge that the sailors held a secret meeting in their barracks that night. According to the men, there was nothing secret about it. Given everything that had happened, of course they sat up discussing the orders they were likely to get the next day—and how they were going to respond.
“What you gonna do?” someone asked Cyril Sheppard.
“I know what I’m gonna do,” he said. “I ain’t going.”
As usual, the men wanted to know what Joe Small was thinking.
Actually, he hadn’t yet made up his mind. Small knew he was being treated unfairly by the Navy, but did that give him the right to disobey orders? He was terrified of another explosion, but didn’t sailors in combat zones face conditions at least as perilous? For Small, fear alone was insufficient cause for demanding different work. Besides, if it was dangerous to go back to work, there was also risk in refusing—could low-ranking sailors really defy the U.S. Navy without expecting serious consequences?
There were no easy answers. But the more Small considered his options, the clearer his decision became. “I was a winch operator,” he remembered of his job at Port Chicago, “and I missed killing a man on the average of once a day. And it was all because of rushing, speed.
“I realized that I had to work. I wasn’t trying to shirk work. But to go back to work under the same conditions with no improvements, no changes, the same group of officers that we had …
“So I came to the conclusion that I was not going back to the same work under the same conditions, under the same men. And that was it.”
COLUMN LEFT
THE NEXT DAY, AUGUST 9, 1944, the men of Joe Small’s division were sent to lunch early. At 11:15 a.m., Lieutenant Delucchi stepped into a small office on the base and picked up a microphone.
“Division Four, turn to for work,” he announced into the mic.
Delucchi then walked toward Barracks C, where his men were quartered. As he crossed the base, he could see down to the pier on the opposite side of a narrow river. Docked at the pier was the USS Sangay, a large, empty ammunition ship.
As Delucchi strolled up to the barracks, the sailors, in their dungarees and blue work shirts, were coming out of the building. Many of the men still wore bandages on their arms and faces from the explosion. They lined up slowly—too slowly for the lieutenant.
“There was a bit of milling around,” Delucchi later said. He stepped up to his chief petty officer, Elmer Boyer, and told Boyer to hurry the men into formation.
Sailors from other divisions stood outside the barracks, chatting and smoking cigarettes. It’s possible they were out there simply because there was no smoking allowed inside the barracks. Or maybe they suspected something interesting was about to happen, and wanted to watch.
The USS Wadleigh docked for loading at the Mare Island Navy Yard in 1945.
“Okay, move ’em out,” Delucchi ordered Boyer when the men were ready.
“Right face!” shouted Boyer. “Forward march!”
The division marched in ranks toward the river. As always, Joe Small marched on the left side of the men, calling cadence.
The group soon approached a T-shaped turn in the road. The path to the right led to the parade ground. The path to the left led down to the ferry, which crossed the river to the loading dock.
A turn to the right meant another day of routine exercise. A turn to the left meant loading ammunition.
“Column left,” Delucchi ordered Boyer.
“Column left!” Boyer shouted.
And then came one of those seemingly small moments that winds up changing the course of history.
Someone in the ranks stopped. Or maybe many of the men stopped at once—different men remembered it differently. Either way, the marching sailors banged together and came to a stop in the road.
Men were looking around. Some seemed confused.
Delucchi turned to his division.
“Will you go back to work?” he demanded, stepping toward them.
No one answered.
“You’re going to load this ship,” he told the men, pointing across the water.
Percy Robinson heard someone near him mutter, “Oh no we ain’t. We’re not gonna go.”
“Joseph Small!” Delucchi shouted. “Front and center!”
Small marched to the front of the formation, turned, and stood face-to-face with the lieutenant.
“Small, will you return to duty?”
“No, sir,” said Small.
Delucchi glared at Small: “Is that final?”
“Yes, sir, that’s final.”
Someone back in the ranks called out: “If Small do
n’t go, we won’t go either!”
Delucchi’s face flushed blood red. He spun away from Small and marched off, leaving his division at the T in the road.
* * *
The men watched Delucchi walk to the administration building where, they knew, he would report to his superiors. They waited. Some sat on the grass.
About fifteen minutes later, a chaplain named Jefferson Flowers left the administration building and walked up to the group. He asked them to gather around.
“What’s the trouble?” asked Flowers.
A few men spoke up, saying they didn’t want to load ammunition.
Flowers tried to persuade them to get on the ferry to the loading dock. It was their duty, he explained. “They said that they would obey any other order,” Flowers would later testify, “but they would not handle ammunition.”
“We told him he was wasting his time talking to us,” remembered Willie Gay. “He should let the white boys load the ammunition.”
The chaplain tried another approach, reminding the men that other sailors and soldiers faced enemy fire on ships and in foxholes—they couldn’t just stop in the middle because they were afraid. Flowers saw tears in the eyes of some of the men as they considered this.
“You can fight back in foxholes,” someone called out, “but you can’t fight back here.”
Delucchi returned. He marched the men to the parade ground, and stepped up onto the reviewing stand.
“You men have given me a hell of a letdown,” Delucchi told his division. “You took an oath, like I did, to obey orders.”
He told them he’d thought they were man enough to handle things when the going got hot, but evidently he’d been mistaken. What’s more, he said, the men were letting down black leaders around the nation, and their entire race.
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