
A view of the wrecked pier after the explosion at Port Chicago. The submerged stern of the Quinault Victory is visible at upper right. (US Navy photo, courtesy of Robert Allen)
Just after 10:18 p.m. on July 17, 1944, UC Berkeley seismographs measured what looked like a 3.4-magnitude earthquake. Far from a routine temblor, though, this was a seismic event of a different kind: a ferocious explosion at the Port Chicago naval base, the worst stateside disaster of World War II.
The cargo ship E.A. Bryan, docked at the base east of Martinez on the southern bank of the Sacramento, California was loaded with 4,000-plus tons of bombs and ammunition, roughly half its capacity, when it lit up the East Bay skies. With the explosive force of five kilotons of TNT, the blast instantly killed 320 men, 202 of them African American, and injured another 390 military personnel and civilians. The Quinault Victory, set to start taking on munitions later that night, was also destroyed, along with the base itself and much of the small town of Port Chicago, more than a mile away. The Bryan was so decimated that its wreckage was never recovered. Neither were most of the bodies.
Aftershocks followed. The explosion led to the six-week trial — and dismayingly swift conviction — of 50 black sailors, whose refusal to return to loading ammunition was judged by the Navy to be mutiny. But Berkeley sociologist Robert Allen, who spent years poring over records and interviewing Port Chicago survivors, views the 'mutiny' as an act of resistance, best understood in the context of other protests by African American servicemen during wartime, and of the nationwide civil-rights movement it foreshadowed.
"What happened there was what was happening to black labor generally — namely, to be segregated into the most demeaning jobs, the hardest jobs, the lowest-paying jobs," says Allen, whose 1989 book, The Port Chicago Mutiny, sparked a resurrection of public interest in a pivotal moment in the history of US race relations. "That was the history of black labor, going back to sharecropping, the Jim Crow system, all of that. These guys were products of that themselves."
Allen, a soft-spoken Georgia native and recently retired Berkeley adjunct professor, will moderate a panel discussion at a 70th-anniversary symposium July 17 at Diablo Valley College, near the site of the disaster. A second panel at the event, which will feature speakers including historian Leon Litwack, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Berkeley professor emeritus, will be moderated by John Lawrence, a Berkeley Ph.D. and former chief of staff to East Bay congressman George Miller, with whom he has worked for federal recognition and exoneration for the convicted sailors.
‘Remember Port Chicago?’
Allen himself was unaware of the case until 1976, when he came across a pamphlet written in 1945 by Thurgood Marshall, a future Supreme Court justice, for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. It began with a question: “Remember Port Chicago?”
Allen read on. The brochure laid out not only the facts of the case, but the broader racial context. All of the roughly 1,400 enlisted men assigned to load ammunition at the base were black, while all the commissioned officers were white. The African American sailors could not become officers, or even transfer laterally to other types of work — including combat, which is why many had volunteered for service in the first place.