Port Chicago Remembered

June 28th, 2006 by sharon mcgriff-payne · No Comments

Sixty two years ago, on a warm July night, James and Minnie Smith were at a dance on Sonoma Boulevard in Vallejo when they heard the huge explosion. While the Smiths didn�t know it then, the blast at nearby Port Chicago Naval Magazine killed 320 men, many of them African Americans.

�The windows in the Sears store (then located at the corner of Georgia Street and Sonoma Boulevard) shattered,� Minnie Smith recalled in a recent recounting of the July 17, 1944 explosion.

The disaster for James Smith, who was a young sailor stationed at Mare Island, was felt more keenly because he and his wife knew many of the sailors who were killed that fateful evening. For several days following the blast, the Smiths struggled to find out more information about what happened that night.

�It was all so hush-hush,� Minnie Smith said.

On Saturday, July 15, a memorial service marking the 62nd anniversary of the disaster will be held to honor those killed or injured during the blast. The service will be held at the Port Chicago National Memorial and will start at 10 a.m.

The reverberations felt by the blast that evening in 1944 would touch off charges of mutiny, and racism in the military. Back then, African American military personnel were used almost exclusively for dangerous jobs, such as loading ammunition.

Within days of the explosion, 258 African American sailors, who were transferred to naval barracks in Vallejo, refused to return to the job of unloading ammunition. Their refusal, seen by military officials as �mutiny� resulted in a summary court martial against 208 of the men. These sailors were given bad conduct discharges, while the remaining 50 enlisted men were found guilty of mutiny and sentenced eight and 15 years of hard labor. In 1946, the convicted men received clemency following monumental protests by African-Americans and others.

The trial was covered extensively by the press, including the Vallejo Observer, an African American newspaper owned and published by local resident, Arthur Scott. It was Scott, active in the Vallejo branch of the NAACP, who contacted the national office of the NAACP in New York. Thurgood Marshall, then special counsel to the NAACP, and a justice on the United States Supreme Court, came to the Bay Area to observe the trial.

Marshall, who observed the trial for 12 days, told the press that the trial was one of the worst �frame-ups we have come across in a long time.�

For information about the commemoration at Port Chicago, call (925) 838-9249. To read more about the Port Chicago explosion go to www.portchicagomutiny.com. Also check out www.portchicago.org.