The board members assured Marshall they would give full consideration to everything he had said. There was nothing more Marshall could do. He went back to New York and waited for news.
* * *
Behind the scenes, Navy lawyers studied the Treasure Island transcript—and agreed with Marshall. Lieutenant Delucchi’s testimony about overhearing unidentified speakers making obscene threats should never have been allowed on the record.
In May 1945, Secretary Forrestal’s office sent a memo to Admiral Wright, telling him the court had made a mistake. Admiral Osterhaus and the other judges would have to reconsider their decision, but without the evidence that should not have been admitted.
Osterhaus and the other officers met in early June. They voted to uphold all fifty convictions and prison sentences.
In July, Marshall got a letter from the Navy telling him the appeal had been rejected. “The trials were conducted fairly and impartially,” the Judge Advocate General’s office concluded. “Racial discrimination was guarded against.”
“It is shocking, to say the least,” a furious Marshall protested in a letter to Forrestal. “I have never run across a prosecutor with a more definite racial bias than that exemplified by Lieutenant Commander Coakley.”
He asked Forrestal for a face-to-face meeting to talk over the case. But it was a long shot, he knew.
“All the appeals were over,” he later said of this low point.
* * *
Japan surrendered to the Allies on August 15, 1945. Americans celebrated an incredibly hard-fought victory in World War II. Soldiers and sailors started coming home.
For Joe Small and the other prisoners at Terminal Island, two more months passed with no update on their case from Secretary Forrestal.
Finally, on October 29, Marshall got a letter from Forrestal.
“I should be happy to confer with you about this case,” read Marshall, “if I felt that any purpose would be served.”
Forrestal had looked over the trial records, he assured Marshall. He’d considered carefully the concerns Marshall raised. None of it changed his mind.
“I do not feel that any purpose would be served by a further presentation.”
The legal process was dead.
SMALL GOES TO SEA
MUCH TO SECRETARY FORRESTAL’S irritation, the Port Chicago story lived on.
People kept sending in petitions demanding justice. A few members of Congress began making noises about the need for an investigation. Lester Granger continued reporting on the integration process. The effort was going well, he told Forrestal, but if the Navy wanted to show black servicemen it was really serious about change, one convincing step would be to free the Port Chicago sailors.
Eleanor Roosevelt was following the case too. Without telling Forrestal how to do his job, she made her position clear by sending him a copy of the NAACP’s persuasive pamphlet, with a hand-written note attached.
“I hope in the case of these boys special care will be taken.”
Feeling the pressure, Forrestal privately reconsidered the case. The Port Chicago sailors had been handed harsh sentences, he knew, largely to send a message about the dangers of defying orders during wartime. With the war won, those sentences looked a bit extreme.
Forrestal still wasn’t about to admit the Navy had made a mistake in convicting the men of mutiny. But maybe he could make the whole controversy quietly disappear.
* * *
In the first week of January 1946, Joe Small was in his cell at Terminal Island when an officer came through shouting orders he’d heard only in dreams.
“Pack your bags! You’re shippin’ out!”
The officer didn’t say when, didn’t say where. That evening, Small and the other Port Chicago prisoners were marched out of the prison, loaded onto trucks, and driven to a nearby pier. Separated into groups of five or six, each was marched up the gangplank of a Navy ship.
Small carried his bag of clothes to a cabin. He lay in a bunk and went to sleep. He still had no idea what was going on.
Waking the next morning to the unfamiliar feel of rolling and pitching, he climbed up to the deck and was shocked to see only ocean in all directions. He turned to a sailor standing nearby.
“How far are we from the nearest land?”
“About two miles,” the guy said.
Small looked around, saw nothing but blue. “Which way?”
“Straight down.”
The men looked at each other for a moment—and both burst out laughing.
On January 7, 1946—a couple days after the Port Chicago men had left land—the Secretary of Navy’s office made it official. The convicted mutineers had been released from prison and returned to active duty for service at sea. Why the secrecy and the delayed announcement? It was all part of Forrestal’s plan to dispose of the story as quietly as possible.
But aboard Small’s ship, the arrival of five of the famous Port Chicago mutineers was big news. “There was plenty of curiosity,” Small remembered. The white sailors wanted to know all the details of what had really happened at Port Chicago.
“When they heard what we’d been through, they said they’d have done the same thing.”
* * *
If the Navy truly believed these men were guilty of mutiny in time of war, why let them off with the light punishment of just sixteen months in jail? And if the Navy really considered the men dangerous mutineers, why send them to sea aboard ships?
Forrestal never answered these questions, probably because the decision to free the men made absolutely no sense—not unless the Navy considered the mutiny convictions to have been a mistake in the first place. Navy officials were not willing to admit this. The Port Chicago fifty were given the chance to finish their naval service as free men.
But they remained convicted mutineers.
Meanwhile, the Navy continued knocking down walls. At the end of World War II, the Navy announced plans to end segregation at all of its training camps. And in February 1946, just a month after the Port Chicago prisoners were let out of jail, the Navy became the first branch of the U.S. military to officially eliminate all racial barriers.
“Effective immediately,” stated the historic order, “all restrictions governing types of assignments for which Negro personnel are eligible are hereby lifted. Henceforth they shall be eligible for all types of assignments in all ratings in all activities and all ships of the naval service.”
The Navy’s decision to end segregation led to an even bigger change. Impressed by the progress being made in the Navy, President Harry Truman issued Executive Order 9981 in July 1948.
“Whereas it is essential that there be maintained in the armed services of the United States the highest standards of democracy, with equality of treatment and opportunity for all those who serve in our country’s defense,” the now-famous order began, “it is hereby declared to be the policy of the President that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin.”
Truman’s order to end segregation in all branches of the United States military was only the beginning of the struggle against segregation in the United States. “We have just begun to scratch the surface in the fight,” Thurgood Marshall cautioned.
But still, desegregation of the military was a serious start. It was a major step forward for the country, and a spark of inspiration for the massive civil rights movement still to come.
* * *
Joe Small’s experience at sea offered a perfect preview of the enormous challenges—and enormous potential—that lay ahead for Americans.
“I was the first black seaman that a lot of these white fellows ever saw,” Small recalled. “I had a lot of conflict over that.”
The tensions burst open one day in the mess hall, when a gigantic redhead from Alabama named Alex set his tray down across the table from Small.
“By gawd,” the young man bellowed, “this i
s the first time I ever ate with a nigger!”
Small lifted his cup of coffee and dashed the liquid in the redhead’s face. Then he hit the guy with the empty mug. Then he dove over the table onto him.
“I mean we tore up that dining room,” Small said of the furious fight that followed. Small was a wiry 150 pounds; the Alabaman was six-three, 260. But Small used his speed to keep things close. “I was so fast he couldn’t hit me. He was so hard I couldn’t hurt him. We both got dog-tired.”
Finally, the captain shoved his way through the cheering sailors and pulled the men apart.
“You wanna fight,” the captain grunted, “put on boxing gloves and go out on the fantail.”
So the men put on gloves and continued the bout on the back of the deck, with everyone watching. The big man swung hard, but couldn’t connect. Small landed a few punches, but with no apparent effect.
After a few minutes, they were too tired to go on.
The skipper stepped in. “All right, knock it off,” he said. “Shake hands.”
Small reached out his hand. Alex took it. And from that moment on, they were best friends.
“Everywhere I went,” said Small, “he was with me.”
On shore leave in San Francisco, they’d hit the bars together.
“Gimme two beers!” Small’s friend would call.
Often, the bartender would glance at the two sailors, one white and one black, and set down a single beer in front of the white sailor. When that happened, Alex would slide the glass to Small.
Then he’d glare over the bar and growl, “Now give me a beer.”
If the bartender so much as hesitated, Alex would leap over the bar, grab a glass, and help himself. Then he’d leap back and lean on the bar beside Small, and the two friends would sip their beers together.
During one of their many conversations, Small asked Alex what it was that had caused him to change his mind about befriending a black man.
“I found out something,” the big redhead said to Small. “A man is a man.”
EPILOGUE: CIVIL RIGHTS HEROES
THINGS WERE DEFINITELY beginning to change.
In early July 1944—just ten days before the explosion at Port Chicago—a young black officer, Lieutenant Jack Robinson, had boarded a bus at Fort Hood, Texas. The white driver told Robinson to move farther back; Robinson refused. The furious driver called for the military police. Robinson and the MPs had an angry confrontation, and Robinson wound up facing a court-martial, charged with insubordination. He was found not guilty. It was such a typical case in World War II, hardly anyone noticed.
Less than three years later, everyone noticed Robinson. On April 15, 1947, at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, New York, Jack Robinson—Jackie to his teammates—took the field as the starting first baseman for the Brooklyn Dodgers. It was a rocky road, being the first black player in Major League Baseball. Some opposing players barked racist filth at him when he came up to bat; some even tried to slice open his legs with flying spikes.
But in American history, change is never smooth, never without resistance.
Jackie Robinson became the first African American player in Major League Baseball.
In 1948 President Truman issued his historic order ending segregation in the military. Again, not everyone accepted the new reality. Port Chicago veteran Spencer Sikes saw this up close when he reenlisted in the Navy in 1951, during the Korean War.
“Things had changed,” Sikes said of conditions on his integrated ship, “but to some degree, the people that were in command, they hadn’t changed.” The military, to its credit, pushed integration forward. By the time the Korean War ended in 1953, 95 percent of African American servicemen were serving in integrated units.
Meanwhile, Thurgood Marshall kept on challenging segregation in court—and kept on winning. In the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansos, Marshall argued that segregation of public schools violated the constitutional rights of black children. In a 9–0 ruling in 1954, the Supreme Court agreed.
A year later, in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a public bus. A young pastor, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., helped lead a boycott of city buses, bringing national attention to the injustice of segregation.
These are the stories we think of as the foundation of the civil rights movement, and rightfully so. But it’s important to remember that before Brown v. Board of Education or Truman’s executive order, before Rosa Parks or Jackie Robinson—before any of this, there was Port Chicago.
* * *
Unlike Jackie Robinson or Rosa Parks, the young sailors from Port Chicago are not remembered as heroes. After finishing their military service, the men returned home and quietly got on with their lives.
Percy Robinson was among the sailors who agreed to go back to work after Admiral Wright’s “death will be the penalty” speech on the baseball diamond. He served at sea, was honorably discharged from the Navy, and had a successful career as an environmental engineer in Los Angeles.
Robert Routh, the sailor blinded in the Port Chicago blast, earned a master’s degree in sociology, worked as a counselor for the Veterans Administration, and became president of the Blinded Veterans Association. Amazingly, Routh and Robinson attended the same Los Angeles church for years before realizing they’d served together as teenagers decades before.
Freddie Meeks in 1994, holding a picture of himself as a young sailor.
“I never talked about my past much,” Routh explained. “He didn’t either.”
That was typical of the Port Chicago survivors. Many of the men—especially those convicted of mutiny—kept the memories buried. It was the only way they could move forward with their lives.
For years, Freddie Meeks couldn’t talk about what had happened. “It would hurt inside,” he said thirty-five years after the war. “You didn’t want your friends to know that you had been charged with mutiny, you didn’t want people to think, you know, that you didn’t like your country.”
Albert Williams didn’t even tell his wife or children about Port Chicago and the mutiny trial. “Every time I would bring it up, or even think about it, I got a hateful feeling,” he said. “It would just about tear me apart.”
Like the other convicted mutineers, Joe Small was discharged “under honorable conditions”—a category of discharge given to men who have performed their duty satisfactorily, but whose record contains some type of disciplinary action. The “honorable conditions” discharge meant Small was eligible for veterans’ health care benefits, but not for the GI Bill, which paid college tuition for veterans. This was a significant disadvantage to a young man trying to start a new life.
Small moved back to New Jersey, married a woman he’d known before the war, and went into the construction business. He was able to earn a decent living building and repairing homes, but always felt the mutiny conviction hanging over him, limiting his opportunities.
“It branded me,” he said, “as a person incapable of following orders.”
Joe Small
Small saw great changes in the country in the decades after World War II—but saw plenty of room for improvement too. He always hired crews with both white and black workers, for example. And without fail, whenever salesmen or bank officials came to one of Small’s construction sites, they’d approach one of the white men first.
“You’re Mr. Small?” they’d ask.
“No,” the worker would say, pointing. “That’s Mr. Small standing alongside of you.”
Small would smile to himself, watching the visitor’s face flush red at having assumed the boss had to be white.
Incredibly, in spite of everything, Joe Small never looked back on his wartime experience with bitterness. “I didn’t have so hard a time that I carry a grudge against the Navy,” he said.
Robert Routh, too, chose to focus on the positive. “I’m glad that I have lived long enough now to see the path of the nation has changed to
the degree that it has.”
Percy Robinson put it best. “I feel that the country at the time was ignorant,” he said, looking back to the 1940s. “They did what they thought was best, which was stupid. And I forgave them for being stupid.”
* * *
In the decades after the war, Port Chicago veterans and their families worked to overturn the convictions of the fifty men.
Robert Edwards, who was wounded in the Port Chicago explosion, was in the hospital when the other men were ordered to return to loading ammunition. He wasn’t among the fifty who refused to go back—but always knew he could have been, if not for his wounds. After the war, Edwards helped the NAACP in its campaign to convince the Navy to reconsider the case. But the Navy saw Port Chicago as ancient history, and had no interest in reopening the files.
“It’s like trying to fight a stone wall,” Edwards said of the effort.
A University of California, Berkeley, professor named Robert Allen gave the effort a huge push forward. Allen spent years tracking down and interviewing men who’d served at Port Chicago, including many of the convicted mutineers. If not for Allen’s tireless cross-country treks, the stories of these men, told in their own words, would have been lost forever. His 1989 book, The Port Chicago Mutiny, sparked fresh press coverage of the case and documentary films about what had happened at Port Chicago and Mare Island.
Robert Edwards in 2004, holding a picture of himself as a young sailor.
This moved several members of Congress from California to petition the secretary of the Navy to review the cases of the convicted mutineers. The secretary wrote back saying it was too late to reexamine cases from World War II, but that the men were free to apply to the President of the United States for pardons.
The Constitution grants the president the power to pardon anyone convicted of a crime in federal or military court. A presidential pardon can get a person out of prison, but does not erase the conviction from his record. For many of the Port Chicago fifty, including Joe Small, this was not good enough.
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