Mr. Speaker, I am here today to recognize the upcoming 80th anniversary of the Port Chicago explosion and to honor and seek justice for the Port Chicago 50, an incident that led President Harry Truman at the time to desegregate the United…
Mr. Speaker, I am here today to recognize the upcoming 80th anniversary of the Port Chicago explosion and to honor and seek justice for the Port Chicago 50, an incident that led President Harry Truman at the time to desegregate the United States Navy.
On Monday, July 17, 1944, at 10:18 p.m., disaster struck. Crewmembers were working in shifts around the clock to load munitions onto newly built ships so they could be sent off to fight in the Pacific in World War II. This explosion ripped through the shipyard at the Port Chicago Naval Magazine, about 18 miles northeast of San Francisco.
The explosion killed or wounded 710 people, 435 of whom were African- American sailors. This was the deadliest homefront disaster of World War II. This explosion was felt in downtown San Francisco as windows shook, and people thought there was an earthquake.
In another blow to the survivors, 50 of the brave enlisted men, all of whom were African American, refused to return to the unsafe working conditions that led to the explosion. They were discriminately convicted of mutiny.
Those men are now known as the Port Chicago 50. They were heroes, not traitors, who deserve to be fully exonerated 80 years later.
Indicative of the discriminatory practices and segregation policies at the time, all the enlisted men loading ammunition at the site were African Americans while all the officers were White. None of the African-American ammunition loaders were formally trained in the safe handling of munitions, as opposed to the Teamsters on the West Coast, who were White and properly trained.
After the explosion, the survivors were in a state of shock, troubled by the vivid memory of the horrible explosion in which so many of their friends had died. The day after the explosion, about 200 of the Black enlisted men helped with the cleanup operation.
One survivor recalled: ``I was there the next morning. We went back to the dock. Man, it was awful. That was a sight. You would see a shoe with a foot in it. . . . You would see a head floating across the water, just the head, or an arm, bodies. Just awful.''
``Everybody was scared,'' another survivor recalled. ``If someone dropped a box or slammed a door, people began jumping around like crazy.''
Many of the Black survivors expected to be granted survivors' leave before being reassigned to regular duty. Those leaves were never granted for the African-American sailors, not even for the men who had been hospitalized.
All the African-American sailors were sent back to work, loading ammunition under the same officers as before, but White officers were allowed to go home for 30-day leaves.
As the men marched to go back to work 3 weeks after the incident at another dock, they knew that, at a certain junction in the road, if they were ordered to turn right, they were going to the parade ground, but if they were ordered to turn left, they were going to continue to load ammunitions, just like they were 3 weeks earlier.
At the moment the sailors were ordered to go left, and they all stopped, one of the officers asked the sailor, Joseph Small, the lead African American, why they stopped. He responded to the White officer: We are scared, sir.
Mr. Speaker, 328 of the sailors followed him and refused to return to work, 258 were imprisoned as a result, and 50 were later charged with conspiring to make mutiny. This was not mutiny. There was no active rebellion, revolt, or coordinated effort to overthrow a command as required by law. It was men who, after having to witness and even clean up the bloody aftermath of this explosion, feared for their lives and were being forced to return to the same unfair conditions and to worry every day whether they would be next.
Thurgood Marshall, who ultimately became involved in their trial on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay for the Port Chicago 50, once said: ``What's at stake here is more than the rights of my clients; it's the moral commitment stated in our Nation's creed.''
This quote rings even more true today, 80 years later. By not taking action to exonerate these brave men, we are reaffirming the discriminatory action taken against them 80 years ago. By refusing to stand up for their innocence, we are sanctioning the discrimination they faced 80 years ago. It is long past time that we right this historical injustice and officially clear the record.