īlack laborers at Port Chicago were led by black petty officers who were regarded by some workers as incompetent and ineffective in voicing their men's concerns to higher authority. Officers at Port Chicago considered the enlisted men unreliable, emotional, and lacking the capacity to understand or remember orders or instructions. The Navy's General Classification Test (GCT) results for the enlisted men at Port Chicago averaged 31, putting them in the lowest twelfth of the Navy. The Navy determined that the quality of African American petty officers at Port Chicago suffered because of the absence of high-scoring black men, and that overall levels of competence were further reduced by the occasional requirement for Port Chicago to supply drafts of men with clear records for transfer to other stations. Port Chicago was manned by workers drawn from those remaining. Composition of African American personnel Īt NSGL, the enlisted African Americans who tested in the top 30 to 40% were selected for non-labor battalion assignments. None of the new recruits had been instructed in ammunition loading. All of the enlisted men had been specifically trained for one of the naval ratings during their stay at Naval Station Great Lakes (NSGL) but the men were instead put to work as stevedores. From the beginning, all the enlisted men employed as loaders at Port Chicago were African-American all their commanding officers were white. The munitions, destined for the Pacific Theater of Operations, were delivered to the Port Chicago facility by rail then individually loaded by hand, crane and winch onto cargo ships for transport to the war zones. Munitions transported through the magazine included bombs, shells, naval mines, torpedoes, and small arms ammunition. The first ship to dock at Port Chicago was loaded on December 8, 1942. ![]() The original magazine was planned in 1941 with construction beginning shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Navy munitions depot, the Port Chicago Naval Magazine, which was later expanded and renamed the Concord Naval Weapons Station but is now called the Military Ocean Terminal Concord. In 1944, the town was a little more than a mile from a U.S. Suisun Bay is connected to the Pacific Ocean by San Francisco Bay. The town of Port Chicago was located on Suisun Bay in the estuary of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers. Marshy tidal zones separate the munitions pier from barracks buildings near the personnel pier and near the town. The munitions loading pier curves to the left beyond 20-odd revetments. The lower left shows utility and personnel piers extending toward the two sections of Seal Island. The town of Port Chicago is in the upper right. As of 2022, the resolution is still marked as introduced.Īerial photograph looking eastward, taken between 19. The resolution will recognize the victims of the explosion and officially exonerates the 50 men court-martialed by the Navy. Representative Mark DeSaulnier was introduced in the 116th United States Congress. On June 11, 2019, a concurrent resolution sponsored by U.S. In 1994, the Port Chicago Naval Magazine National Memorial was dedicated to the lives lost in the disaster. Widespread publicity surrounding the case turned it into a cause célèbre among Americans opposing discrimination targeting African Americans it and other race-related Navy protests of 1944–45 led the Navy to change its practices and initiate the desegregation of its forces beginning in February 1946. Owing to public pressure, the United States Navy reconvened the courts-martial board in 1945 the court affirmed the guilt of the convicted men. Forty-seven of the 50 were released in January 1946 the remaining three served additional months in prison.ĭuring and after the trial, questions were raised about the fairness and legality of the court-martial proceedings. ![]() Fifty men-called the " Port Chicago 50"-were convicted of mutiny and sentenced to 15 years of prison and hard labor, as well as a dishonorable discharge. Approximately two-thirds of the dead and injured were enlisted African American sailors.Ī month later, unsafe conditions inspired hundreds of servicemen to refuse to load munitions, an act known as the Port Chicago Mutiny. Munitions detonated while being loaded onto a cargo vessel bound for the Pacific Theater of Operations, killing 320 sailors and civilians and injuring 390 others. Bryan that occurred on July 17, 1944, at the Port Chicago Naval Magazine in Port Chicago, California, United States. The Port Chicago disaster was a deadly munitions explosion of the ship SS E.
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