“Negroes are not afraid of anything any more than anyone else,” he said. “Negroes in the Navy don’t mind loading ammunition. They just want to know why they were the only ones doing the loading! They want to know why they are segregated, why they don’t get promoted!”
As for James Coakley, Marshall told the crowd, the man obviously had a problem with black sailors, and his prejudice was making it impossible for the defendants to get a fair trial.
Two days later, Marshall issued a statement calling on the Navy to open an investigation into the Port Chicago disaster and trial. The defense lawyers were doing a good job, Marshall said, but the court-martial wasn’t even scratching the surface of the real issues behind the so-called mutiny.
“A Navy Department investigation would clear up a lot of questions which are in my mind about this whole situation,” Marshall told the press. “For instance, I want to know why, at the time of the explosion at Port Chicago, every man loading ammunition there was a Negro.”
He challenged the Navy to explain its policy of segregation and to explain why black sailors were put to work on the loading docks with no training. “I want to know why commissioned officers at Port Chicago were allowed to race their men. I want to know why bets ranging from five dollars up were made between division officers as to whose crew would load more ammunition.”
* * *
While Marshall waited for answers, the lawyers on Treasure Island made their closing arguments.
Coakley spent four hours hammering away at the points he’d been making for the past six weeks. After the Port Chicago explosion, he charged, the men knew they’d be ordered to load ammunition again soon—and secretly began plotting to resist. As evidence, Coakley reminded the court of the lists that many of the defendants had signed. He reminded judges of Delucchi’s testimony about hearing offensive remarks from the men. “Don’t go to work for the white motherf—ers,” Coakley quoted. “And he heard that three times.”
After the men refused to load ammunition, Coakley continued, they were packed onto the prison barge, where many of the sailors had second thoughts about defying their officers. But rather than letting anyone break with the group, Joe Small called a meeting.
“Now, that was a mutinous assembly,” Coakley told the judges, “that was a mutinous meeting. After it ended, there was cheering and clapping.”
“These fifty men are guilty,” concluded Coakley. “There is ample evidence to sustain a conviction of all of these fifty men.”
The next morning, day thirty-three of the trial, Gerald Veltmann took his turn.
“Gentlemen, we speak now for the accused,” he began, “for these fifty men who are here charged with mutiny.”
Veltmann read the Navy’s definition of mutiny: “An unlawful opposition or resistance to or defiance of superior military authority, with a deliberate purpose to usurp, subvert, or override such authority.” Then he asked the judges, “In what way have these accused gentlemen, usurped, subverted, or overridden their superior military authority?”
All the evidence offered by the prosecution, Veltmann insisted, broke down upon closer examination. Take the list that some men signed in the barracks. “What was the list for?” asked Veltmann. “It was a list of men who didn’t want to handle ammunition, and can you wonder at that?”
Was there really “mutinous talk” in the barracks in the days leading up to August 9? “The record shows no such talk,” said Veltmann. Men talked of the Port Chicago explosion, sure, and of their fear of ammunition. “And what would be more natural than the discussion and exchange of views by the men that underwent that experience? This is not conspiracy; that is not scheming; that does not provide the essential elements of mutiny.”
What about the obscene remarks supposedly overheard by Lieutenant Delucchi on August 9? No one else heard them, Veltmann reminded the court. Besides, even Delucchi couldn’t say with any certainty that the remarks were made by one of the fifty defendants.
Was Joe Small really a devious ringleader? Look at that incident at Camp Shoemaker, when that joker stuck a sheet into the fan and the men panicked. “Who calmed them and restored order?” asked Veltmann. “Yes, Joe Small, a member of the Fourth Division, whom Lieutenant Delucchi chose to keep order elsewhere, on the barge.”
Sure, Small spoke at that barge meeting and urged the men to “stick together”—stick together in obeying orders and maintaining discipline.
Veltmann reminded the court of the stories of Dunn and Dixson, the men taken off loading duty by doctors, and of Oliver Green, the sailor with the broken wrist. How could these men be considered mutineers?
The bottom line, Veltmann insisted, was that the prosecution had presented no reliable evidence of any kind of plot, or any attempt to seize authority from officers. “And without proof of these elements,” Veltmann concluded, “the case of the prosecution most certainly has not been proven.”
“Gentlemen, that completes our argument, and we submit that these fifty men are not guilty of the offense of mutiny.”
The court was cleared at 11:55 a.m. After an eighty-minute lunch break, everyone returned and Admiral Osterhaus announced the verdict.
All fifty men were found guilty of mutiny.
All fifty sailors received handwritten sentences dictating identical terms.
HARD LABOR
CYRIL SHEPPARD FELT a rush of terror when he heard the verdict.
“My knees almost hit the ground,” he remembered. His first thought was of his newborn daughter at home—would he ever see her?
“The verdict was guilty,” Joe Small recalled, “guilty as charged.” Small was shaken by the news, but not exactly surprised. “I expected it, from the way that the trial went.”
Small and the others were led back to the brig, where they waited several days to find out if they were going to be shot.
Finally, they were called together to hear the sentences read. All fifty sentences were identical—fifteen years of hard labor in prison, and dishonorable discharge from the Navy.
“Fifteen years,” Jack Crittenden remembered thinking. “Here I ain’t but nineteen years old.” He quickly calculated how old he’d be when he got out. He wondered if his mother and father would still be alive.
Many of the men cried; many were too dazed to react.
“I tried to calm the men down,” Small later said. He assured the men they’d survive this; they’d be free again one day. “All you gotta do is keep your nose clean, and you’ll get out.”
The sentences were sent to Admiral Wright for his review. Wright knocked a few years off the jail terms of some of the youngest men. Small and nine others were ordered to serve the full fifteen.
In November, the Port Chicago fifty were handcuffed and taken to the Naval Disciplinary Barracks at Terminal Island in southern California, where the Navy confined serious offenders facing long sentences. The men were locked behind bars, two to a cell. In what seems like a cruel joke, each of the fifty was given a copy of the complete court-martial transcript—a foot-high pile of papers that only served to remind them of how bogus the trial had been.
“You can look all the way through there,” Edward Waldrop said, “read all fifty men’s statements, you will find no way in there that the government really proved that we mutinied.”
“Everything was rigged,” Small agreed.
Actually, Small may have been even closer to the truth than he knew. Decades after the trial, Gerald Veltmann revealed a shocking detail. Between courtroom sessions, while the accused men were still testifying, Veltmann had overheard Admiral Osterhaus say, “We’re going to find them guilty.”
* * *
The men had one hope—Thurgood Marshall was on the case.
Declaring the mutiny convictions “one of the worst frame-ups we have come across in a long time,” Marshall promised to fight on. The Port Chicago fifty had been judged guilty of mutiny, but their real crime, he insisted—the thing that really got them in trouble—was drawing att
ention to the disgraceful way the United States Navy treated black sailors.
Marshall wrote directly to Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, arguing that the Treasure Island trial had been completely unsatisfactory, leaving every key question unanswered.
“Why is it that the only naval personnel loading ammunition regularly were Negroes?” Marshall asked. “Why is it that these men were not given any training whatsoever in the dangers to be found in loading ammunition? Why is it that officers ‘raced’ their gangs in contests in the loading of ammunition?”
The people were demanding answers, Marshall insisted, and the answers needed to come from the top.
Forrestal must have cringed as he read this. He’d been hoping the whole embarrassing Port Chicago mess would blow over. Now, with Thurgood Marshall on the job, the story was not about to go away.
In his response, Forrestal assured Marshall that he’d looked over the case and had seen no convincing proof of unsafe conditions on the loading pier, or of officers betting on tonnage totals. He suggested that racism played no part in the Navy’s treatment of the Port Chicago men. Why had only black sailors been assigned to load ammunition at Port Chicago? Simple, Forrestal explained: the base was manned almost entirely by black sailors. “Naturally, therefore, the only naval personnel loading ammunition regularly were Negroes.”
Forrestal couldn’t possibly have expected Marshall to buy such lame reasoning. But the secretary was not about to admit that the Navy deserved any of the blame for the Port Chicago explosion, or the so-called mutiny that followed.
Not in public, anyway.
Privately, Forrestal was more convinced than ever that segregation was becoming a major aggravation for the Navy. And worse, an unnecessary one.
Captains were starting to report on the experiment begun that summer with integrated ship crews. After all of the Navy’s hand-wringing about racial tensions on ships, white and black sailors shocked everyone by getting along fine.
“The assimilation of the general service Negro personnel aboard this ship has been remarkably successful,” went one typical report from an integrated ship’s commander. “To the present date there has been no report of any difficulty which could be laid to their color.”
A similar report came in from one of President Roosevelt’s sons, Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., who commanded a destroyer escort. He’d heard grumbling from some of the white crew when they first heard black sailors were coming aboard. Then the young men started living and working side by side. “Before we reached the Panama Canal my racial problem had vanished,” Roosevelt reported.
Forrestal was encouraged, and he was determined to push integration further. Still, he had no intention of reducing the sentences of the Port Chicago mutineers.
* * *
In their cells on Terminal Island, the Port Chicago prisoners kept up with the story through letters from their families and articles in black newspapers. The NAACP helped spread the men’s version of events by publishing a powerfully worded pamphlet on the case.
“The Navy has denied them every right of equality in the service,” the pamphlet said of the imprisoned men. “It has denied them their rights as Americans to serve in active sea duty. It has segregated them, insulted them, risked their lives by sheer unnecessary inefficiency, and now it will send them to a Federal penitentiary for years in order to save its own face.”
Marshall sent the prisoners copies of the pamphlet. It was strong stuff, but the men had no idea if it would help. All they could do was try to adjust to the grinding daily routine, a mix of boredom and outdoor labor.
“Hard labor was anything they wanted you to do,” Small recalled. Some days they wove ropes or made nets for ships. Some days they cleared driftwood from beaches or smashed big rocks into little rocks with sixteen-pound sledgehammers. Marines, armed with pistols and clubs, watched their every move.
Luckily for the Port Chicago sailors, they were respected—even feared—by both prisoners and guards. “We were celebrities,” Small said. “We had a reputation for being unruly and bad.”
Terminal Island could be a rough place, but the Port Chicago fifty were known as the guys who’d stood up to the U.S. Navy. Wherever they went, they heard men whispering, “There go the Port Chicago boys.”
“Nobody bothered us,” Small said.
* * *
Just as Forrestal feared, the Port Chicago story was not going away.
While Thurgood Marshall prepared an appeal on behalf of the convicted men, black newspapers printed editorials calling for justice. Thousands of people signed petitions demanding the Navy reopen the case. At the same time, more trouble at American military bases around the world only cranked up the pressure.
On the island of Guam in the South Pacific, rising tensions between black sailors and white marines exploded on Christmas Eve, 1944. At a town near base, a group of marines were annoyed to see black sailors chatting with local women. The marines shot at the sailors, chasing them out of town. The next night, back on the base, the sailors jumped into trucks and headed toward the marine camp to fight it out. They were intercepted by military police and arrested. Forty-three black sailors were court-martialed, convicted of rioting, and thrown in jail.
At Camp Rousseau in California, black sailors faced all the same humiliations the Port Chicago men had—segregation, racist insults, the worst jobs, no promotions. Finally sick of it, they hit back with a hunger strike in early 1945. They’d follow orders, the sailors told their officers, and continue working, but they would not eat. The strike only lasted a couple of days, but the story got into the newspapers, focusing more attention on the military’s unfair treatment of black servicemen.
Something had to be done, Forrestal decided.
Back when the war began, naval leaders had argued that racism was not their problem. The Navy had a war to win, and couldn’t be expected to solve America’s race problems at the same time. But things looked different after Port Chicago and these newer incidents. Segregation was actually hampering the war effort. It was time for a new plan—whether the country was ready for it or not.
The Navy assigned more black sailors to integrated crews aboard ships, and the first black naval officers were assigned to ships at sea. More white sailors were moved into unpopular shore duty assignments, like ammunition loading. The change was gradual. But it was real change.
“The Navy accepts no theories of racial differences in inborn ability,” the Bureau of Naval Personnel informed all naval officers in February 1945, “but expects that every man wearing its uniform be trained and used in accordance with his maximum individual capacity.”
Lester Granger during an inspection of facilities for black servicemen at Naval Air Station, San Diego, June 20, 1945.
Forrestal appointed Lester Granger, an African American civil rights leader, as a civilian advisor. Granger’s task: to tour bases all over the world, watch the integration process up close, and recommend ways to improve it. This was an absolutely stunning reversal from just four years before, when the Navy considered black men fit only to cook and clean.
But for fifty of the men who’d help force this change, there was no change. The Port Chicago fifty were still doing hard labor in southern California.
* * *
When they weren’t outside working, the Port Chicago men hung out together, talking and playing cards. “We didn’t socialize with the other prisoners too much,” Edward Waldrop explained. “We stayed mostly to ourselves, by ourselves.”
The men knew Thurgood Marshall was preparing their appeal. They knew any chance of winning would be blown if they got into trouble in prison. So they stuck close together, reminding each other of what Marshall had told them at Treasure Island. “Play it cool,” he’d said. “I’m working.”
In early April 1945, Marshall traveled to Washington, D.C. to present the appeal. Standing before a board of officers, he made his case.
“One day, sitting in at that trial, would convince you that there
was something wrong,” Marshall told the officers. The prosecution had painted the defendants as a unified group of plotters, but that just wasn’t the reality. “They are all different,” Marshall said of the fifty. “A couple of them are just plain kids.”
Maybe they’re guilty of resisting an order, Marshall suggested. That doesn’t equal mutiny. Some of the most damning evidence of the entire trial came from the statements Lieutenant Delucchi reported overhearing: “Don’t go to work for the white motherf—ers,” and similar remarks. But Delucchi couldn’t identify the men who said these things, and wasn’t sure they even came from one of the accused.
Legally, this type of hearsay evidence should never have been allowed on the record—and James Coakley, a trained prosecutor, knew it. “He misled the court,” Marshall charged. “He deliberately set upon a course of getting into the record evidence that he himself knows is inadmissible. When the evidence which is the meat of the so-called mutiny is inadmissible testimony, then the case has to fail.”
As further proof the trial had been a sham, Marshall pointed out how little time the judges had spent reaching a verdict—an average of ninety-six seconds deciding each man’s fate, assuming they didn’t take time off for lunch. “In a case involving fifty men, you can’t sit down in less than an hour, or a little over an hour, and give each one individual consideration as to which one is guilty and which one is not.”
“I do not take up cases unless I am convinced that the men are innocent,” Marshall told the board. “I was never so convinced that the evidence was insufficient in a case as I was in listening to that case.”
“Justice can only be done,” he concluded, “by a complete reversal of the findings.”
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