“No, sir.”
“Did you try to convince anyone not to load ammunition?”
“No, sir.”
“Did anyone try to convince you not to load ammunition?”
“No, sir.”
Veltmann asked Small about the list that circulated in the barracks. Small said, truthfully, that he hadn’t signed it. He didn’t mention he’d destroyed it.
Next, Veltmann asked about the now-famous barge meeting. Earlier in the trial, Lieutenant Delucchi had testified that he had called Small aside before the men got on the barge. According to Delucchi, he simply asked Small to see that the men got on and off the barge in an orderly fashion.
Small’s version of the conversation was different.
“Now, when you were put on the barge,” Veltmann asked, “did Lieutenant Delucchi say anything to you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What did he say?”
“I was to see to it that no rough stuff was carried on,” Small said of his orders from Delucchi. “He told me, ‘I am putting you in charge of the division, and I am giving you three men to work under you, and out of you four, you ought to be able to keep things straight.’”
It was with these orders in mind, Small explained, that he called the meeting on the barge. He saw trouble coming between the sailors and the guards, and he considered it his job to help defuse the situation.
“I stepped out where I thought that everyone could see me,” Small described. “Then I went on to tell them that they had to knock off the horseplay, obey the S.P.s, the shore patrol, take orders that were given to them by the officers.… I told them also if they pulled together, they would find out that things would be much easier for them.”
“What did you mean by that, Small?” asked Veltmann.
“I meant to pull together in keeping themselves straight, one to the other; if one got off wrong, it was up to his shipmate, his pal, whoever it might be, to tell him to ‘straighten up and fly right,’ knock it off, get back in line.”
“In other words, you meant keep order, isn’t that what you meant?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did you make the statement attributed to you by other witnesses that ‘We have the officers by the ass’?”
“No, sir.”
“Or ‘We have the officers by the tail’?”
“No, sir.”
“Or ‘We have the officers by the balls’?”
“No, sir.”
This seems to be the one case in which Small was untruthful on the stand. He later explained that Veltmann had privately advised him to deny having told the men “We have the officers by the balls.” Small had wanted to explain to the court that he hadn’t meant it as a threat, but was using language he knew would get the men’s attention. But Veltmann didn’t think the judges would accept this explanation.
* * *
Coakley stood up, eager to cross-examine the witness.
“How old are you, Small?” Coakley began.
“Twenty-three, sir.”
Coakley knew this, of course, but wanted to remind the court that Small was older than most of the other defendants. The prosecutor was building his case on the theory that Small was their secret leader.
“You refused to march to the ship on the 9th of August, didn’t you?” Coakley asked.
“Well, I stopped after I bumped into one of the petty officers that was walking ahead of me.”
“I will ask you the question again; you refused to march to the ship on the 9th of August, didn’t you?”
“We were never told we were going to the ship,” Small replied. “We got the command ‘Column left’ and everyone stopped; I bumped into the petty officer, and I stopped too.”
Coakley tried to show that Small knew exactly what the “Column left” order meant. Small didn’t deny it.
“When you heard ‘Column left’ did you know what you were going to do?” asked Coakley.
“We had an idea.”
“What was your idea?”
“That we were going to the ship.”
“To load ammunition?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Because when you got ‘Column left’ that would take you down to the river where the ferry was to take you across to the ship; is that right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you had made up your mind before that that you were not going to handle ammunition, hadn’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
Coakley paused. He apparently hadn’t expected Small to concede this point—and wanted to make sure the judges didn’t miss it. “You had made up your mind that you would obey any orders except the order to handle ammunition?”
“Yes, sir.”
Coakley was getting so excited he started repeating himself.
“When the division got a ‘Column left’ order, you realized you were going to the ship, didn’t you?”
“Object to the question as having been asked and answered,” Veltmann pointed out.
“Withdraw the question,” Coakley said.
But he couldn’t help himself. “At that time when the division, the Fourth Division, received the command ‘Column left,’ you refused to go, didn’t you?”
“I had to stop,” Small said. “I bumped into the petty officer; I couldn’t walk over on top of him.”
“Will you answer that question yes or no?” Coakley demanded. “Either you refused to go or you didn’t.”
“I didn’t go.”
“You refused to go, didn’t you?”
Veltmann objected again. “He has already answered the question.”
“Withdraw the question,” said Coakley.
At this point Admiral Osterhaus declared it was time to break for lunch.
* * *
An hour and twenty minutes later, Small was back on the stand, and the cross-examination continued. Coakley tried again and again to get Small to admit that he had convinced his fellow sailors not to load ammunition. Small refused to budge from the exact same story he’d been telling all along. Yes, before August 9 there had been a lot of talk among the men about how they might react if ordered to load ammunition. And yes, Small had made up his mind not to load. But no, he had not tried to influence anyone else, and there had been no secret plot.
Frustrated, Coakley moved on to another key point, the barge meeting.
“Now then, you called the meeting, didn’t you?”
Small explained that he had talked with a few other men on the barge, and they agreed, together, to hold a meeting.
“Answer the question yes or no, either you did or you didn’t.”
“I had a part in calling it.”
Veltmann jumped back up to clarify a crucial detail about the barge meeting.
“Why did you call the meeting?” he asked Small.
“Well, because I felt that it would help in getting the boys to do right, discipline on the barge, different things that needed to be done.”
“In other words, you were performing, then, the duty as a petty officer that Lieutenant Delucchi ordered you to do?”
“Yes, sir.”
Coakley didn’t accept this. “Did Lieutenant Delucchi tell you to hold a meeting on the barge?” he asked Small.
“No, sir.”
“Then you weren’t performing any duties as a petty officer when you called a meeting, were you?”
“He did not give me orders to call a meeting,” explained Small, “but he told me to keep discipline on the barge, and I felt that that was the best way to speak to all the men at one time.”
“You weren’t even a petty officer?”
“No, sir.”
“You never have been a petty officer?”
“No, sir.”
These types of exchanges continued all afternoon.
* * *
Thurgood Marshall sat with the newspaper reporters, watching, listening, planning his next moves.
“Defense counsel are good and know what they are doing,”
he wrote of Veltmann and his team in a letter to NAACP head Walter White. “Prosecutor is vicious and dumb. There is no evidence of mutiny.”
Between sessions in court, he visited with the prisoners.
“I’m Thurgood Marshall,” he told the men. “I’m the chief special counsel for the NAACP. And we have taken an interest in this case, and we’re watching this.”
“He just said to play it cool, and he was working, he was working on it,” Freddie Meeks remembered. “And he really did go to bat for us.”
Although Marshall liked what he saw of Veltmann as a courtroom lawyer, he wasn’t happy with the overall strategy of the defense. Nothing at all was being said about the Navy’s unequal treatment of black sailors. Nothing was said of the segregation at Port Chicago, or the unsafe working conditions. Without looking honestly at these factors, the court would never get at the true cause of the men’s refusal to load ammunition.
The fifty defendants felt exactly the same.
“The defense strategy, to me it was a mockery,” Martin Bordenave later said.
“The guy who was defending us, he didn’t have no defense,” Edward Waldrop added.
Joe Small was equally irritated that the whole truth wasn’t being heard. In private, he told the defense lawyers all about the problems at Port Chicago. “I discussed it with them lengthily,” he later explained. “Working conditions, and the betting among the officers. But it didn’t come out in the trial.”
As frustrating as this was, Small was smart enough to figure out what was going on. The defense lawyers were all naval officers—they weren’t going to bring out details that would be embarrassing to the Navy. And even if they’d wanted to, the judges wouldn’t have let them.
“We couldn’t volunteer any information, we could only answer questions that were put to us,” Small explained. “And if you volunteered anything, they would tell you, ‘Please answer the questions yes or no.’ So you didn’t get a chance to bring out any information that they didn’t want brought out.”
The whole trial gave Albert Williams the unsettling feeling of being a kid and being accused by an adult of something he hadn’t done. “That was the atmosphere there,” he said of the mood in the courtroom. “No matter what you say, you’re going to get this whipping. Whether you’re right or wrong, somebody did it—and you’re going to get whipped.”
THE VERDICT
VELTMANN SPENT the next two weeks calling each of the accused mutineers. By letting each man speak, he hoped to show the court that this was hardly a cohesive group of conspirators. Rather, this was a bunch of very young men, with different stories, and different reasons for doing what they did.
For instance, John Dunn, one of the defendants, weighed just 104 pounds. A Navy doctor had specifically told him he wasn’t strong enough to load ammunition. Dunn was working as mess cook on the morning of August 9, but Lieutenant James Tobin ordered him down to the loading pier anyway.
“I told him the doctor told me I was too light to work on the dock,” Dunn testified. “He said, ‘That makes no difference.’”
Tobin told Dunn to step over with those who refused to work, and Dunn was marched to the prison barge.
Another defendant, Julius Dixson, had suffered dizzy spells on the pier. Lieutenant Delucchi considered the man a hazard to his entire division and agreed when a doctor declared him unfit for loading. Dixson spent the day of August 9 working in the mess hall and didn’t even know about the Division Four men getting the “Column left” order and stopping in the road. But on Delucchi’s orders, a lieutenant named Eugene Kaufmann confronted Dixson in the kitchen.
“Dixson, you can’t be a mess cook forever,” Kaufmann chided.
“I am not able to load ammunition,” Dixson replied.
Hearing that, Kaufmann ordered Dixson to report to the barge and join the other prisoners. Both Dixson and Dunn were counted among the fifty accused mutineers—without ever having been ordered to load.
* * *
Ollie Green was another sailor with a unique story. Wounded in the face and chest by flying glass in the Port Chicago blast, Green was back on duty with Division Four in early August. But then, on August 8, he fell while running to chow, fracturing his left wrist.
Green told the court that on the morning of August 9, he’d been lying in bed when the division mustered for work. He lay around a while longer, and then left the barracks with his arm in a sling. By the time he strolled outside, the men had already stopped in the road, and Chaplain Flowers was out there trying to persuade them to go to work.
“Are you willing to go back to work loading ammunition?” Flowers asked Green.
“No, sir,” Green said, explaining that his wrist was killing him, and the doctor had put him on the sick list.
Green wanted to talk with Lieutenant Delucchi, but never got the chance—he was sent right to the prison barge. He testified that he was afraid of ammunition, but would have gone to load if he’d been specifically ordered to do so. He never was.
“What, then, was the reason that you said no?” Coakley asked in his cross-examination. “Because you had a broken wrist or because you were afraid of ammunition, which was it?”
“I had a broken wrist and I was afraid of ammunition,” said Green.
“Both of them?”
“Yes, sir.”
“If you hadn’t had a broken wrist, would you have said yes?”
“Yes, sir.”
After Coakley’s questions, Admiral Osterhaus asked Green the same exact question he asked every witness at the end of his testimony: “Do you have anything further to state?”
This was a mere formality—witnesses were expected to say, “No, sir,” and return to their seats. Ollie Green shocked everyone in the room by going off script.
“I got a couple of things to say, sir,” Green told the admiral.
Both Veltmann and Coakley looked on in shocked silence as the witness continued.
“The reason I was afraid to go down and load ammunition, them officers, the guys down there loading ammunition, racing each division to see who put on the most tonnage, and I knowed the way they was handling ammunition, it was liable to go off again.”
Green looked out at the room of stunned faces, and added, “This is my reason for not going down there.”
Newspapers rushed to print the story of Green’s unexpected testimony. The Navy responded with a statement denying the charge—there had been no racing and no betting at Port Chicago.
* * *
One by one, Veltmann called the accused men to the stand. Though each sailor’s memory of events was slightly different, a few main points were repeated over and over.
Nearly every man testified that he was afraid of ammunition after the Port Chicago blast. Not a single one attended secret meetings, or joined a plan not to load. Most had seen lists requesting a change of duty circulating in the barracks in the days before August 9. Some had signed, some hadn’t. And just about everyone recalled Joe Small speaking to the group on the barge on August 10. The gist of Small’s talk was that he was trying to keep order.
In his cross-examinations, Coakley tried again and again to get at least one defendant to admit to being a part of a mutiny plot. No luck. He tried again and again to get someone to say that Joe Small was behind the whole thing. No one did.
The prosecutor’s rising frustration became obvious as he questioned a sailor named Frank Henry. Henry testified he had signed a list that stated “The below signed men are afraid to handle ammunition and would like some change of duty.”
Coakley simply could not accept this. He wanted to know what else was on the paper, how tall the paper was, how wide, how many names were on it.
“I couldn’t say,” Henry said about the number of names.
“Was it full or half-full?” demanded Coakley.
“It was just about three-quarters full.”
“Was it signed in one column or in two columns?”
“It was one column whe
n I signed it.”
“When was that?”
“I couldn’t say.”
“How long before the ninth of August?”
“I couldn’t say.”
Coakley finally burst, shouting, “Where did you take your boot training?”
“Great Lakes.”
“Did you learn to say ‘sir’ when you talk to an officer? Did you learn that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Why don’t you say it instead of being so insolent?”
Veltmann objected to this hostile attack.
“He hasn’t said it either to you or to me as yet,” Coakley complained to Veltmann.
“He has said, ‘Yes, sir,’ a number of times,” Veltmann pointed out.
Admiral Osterhaus sustained the objection.
The testimony of Alphonso McPherson, one of the fifty, ignited Coakley’s biggest tantrum. McPherson described being interrogated by Coakley a few days after August 9. Coakley had seemed unhappy with McPherson’s answers and finally said, “I’ll give you one more chance. Come clean or I’ll see that you get shot.”
Hearing this, Coakley leaped to his feet, flushing red and shouting, “You are sure of that?”
“Yes, sir,” McPherson insisted, “I am sure you told it to me.”
Coakley tried to shake McPherson from his story but couldn’t. He turned to Admiral Osterhaus.
“This thing was injected into the record which I claim is not true, I never told him he was going to be shot,” Coakley moaned. “I am not trying to conceal anything here, and I am very indignant about it. It is hitting below the belt, that’s all it is, if it please the court.”
The entire courtroom exploded into laughter—defendants, lawyers, reporters, even the judges. The admiral had to slam his gavel on the table to restore order.
* * *
Coakley’s aggressive outbursts convinced Thurgood Marshall that something was very wrong in the Treasure Island courtroom.
During tense trials, Marshall was fond of urging his staff to keep cool. “Lose your head, lose your case,” was his motto. But after a week on Treasure Island, Marshall was having trouble following his own rule.
“The NAACP is going to make it its job to expose the whole rotten Navy setup which led to the Port Chicago explosion, and in turn to the so-called ‘mutiny’ trial of fifty Negro sailors now taking place,” Marshall announced at a meeting of the NAACP in San Francisco. “This is not an individual case. This is not fifty men on trial for mutiny. This is the Navy on trial for its whole vicious policy toward Negroes.
The Port Chicago 50 Page 9