Navy Secretary Carlos del Toro said in an interview that the decision to acquit the sailors came after a Navy investigation found legal errors in the 1944 court-martial of 258 black sailors who had been threatened with execution for refusing to return to work after the July 17, 1944, explosion.
The cause of the explosion remains unknown, which injured more than 400 people, destroyed two ships and a train, and devastated the nearby town of Port Chicago, which naval historians have called the nation’s worst disaster of World War II.
After the explosion, white supervisors were given hardship leave. However, the black sailors who survived the explosion were ordered back to work loading munitions onto ships. Hundreds of black sailors, who had suffered racism in the segregated Navy due to dangerous conditions and lack of training, refused to return to work. Fifty were charged with mutiny and 208 with disobedience to orders.
Del Toro told The Washington Post that the charges were “a huge mistake that has haunted many survivors and their families.” “I have made the decision, within my authority under the law at the time, to vacate the results of the courts-martial of all sailors convicted in the Port Chicago incident,” del Toro said.
Del Toro said the acquittal of the African-American sailors “restores their honor and recognizes the courage they showed in the face of great danger.”
The Port Chicago battalion was made up primarily of black enlisted men and white officers because Navy personnel policies at the time barred black sailors from most seagoing duties, the Navy statement said. Black sailors worked grueling 24-hour shifts loading ammunition in dangerous conditions on Wednesday while white officers supervising them took bets on which shift would load the most ammunition, a Navy investigation found.
The acquittals announced Wednesday cover 256 of the 258 sailors convicted in 1944. The convictions of the remaining two sailors were set aside by former Navy secretaries due to insufficient evidence and a determination that one sailor was not capable of understanding the consequences of disobeying Navy orders.
A new investigation ordered by Del Toro, who took over as secretary in 2021, found that 258 African-American sailors were wrongly tried en masse in 1944. The legal investigation also concluded that the sailors were not given adequate legal representation — their lawyers were tasked with defending large groups of sailors who were grouped together alphabetically.
“The litigation lawyers didn’t have time to properly prepare for the litigation,” Navy General Counsel Sean Coffey said in an interview.
According to Regina T. Akers, a historian in the Naval History and Heritage Command’s Historical Documents Division, the Port Chicago disaster began at approximately 10:19 p.m. on the night of July 17, 1944, when two massive explosions, seconds apart, destroyed a U.S. Navy munitions storehouse in Port Chicago, California.
The explosion destroyed two cargo ships: the SS Quinault Victory and And the SS EA Bryan was anchored at the pier, carrying over 4,600 tons of anti-aircraft munitions, aerial bombs, high explosives, and smokeless powder., According to a Navy report.
The Navy said the explosion destroyed nearly everything within a 1,000-foot radius of the facility, including a nearby cargo ship, a port pier, rail cars, a 45-ton locomotive, a Coast Guard barge and a pier that was under construction.
The explosion had a force equivalent to 5,000 tonnes of TNT, a shock wave comparable to a magnitude 3.4 earthquake. “Witnesses reported seeing a huge column of fire that grew like a mushroom and produced a spectacular yellow-orange light,” Akers said.
After the explosion, the search for survivors turned almost immediately into a recovery operation, with “only 51 intact bodies that could be identified and the smell of burning flesh in the air,” according to the Navy.
Hundreds of the dead were unidentified. “The surviving men were all traumatized,” Akers said. “They were instructed to go through the rubble looking for survivors. They ended up picking through limbs.”
According to a congressional report, 202 of the 320 sailors killed in the explosion were black, accounting for one-fifth of all African-American Navy casualties during World War II.
Before the explosion, African-American sailors reported unsafe conditions and requested the Navy provide them with work gloves, but their requests were denied. Some sailors wrote letters to their families asking for gloves to be sent to them. They also wrote letters to the NAACP and the National Urban League describing the unsafe working conditions.
After the explosion, the surviving sailors at Port Chicago were sent to Mare Island Naval Shipyard near Vallejo, California, about 23 miles northeast of San Francisco.
The Navy immediately launched an investigation and convened a board of inquiry. According to the Navy, investigators interviewed 120 witnesses. After a 39-day investigation, the Navy exonerated all white officers at Port Chicago.
“The exact cause of the initial explosion could not be ascertained,” the Navy declared, according to a Navy report. “The 1,200-page court report suggested that whatever the cause of the explosion, an African-American munitions handler must have had something to do with it.”
“Eventually, they received orders to return to work,” Akers said. “They were very concerned that unless they changed their procedures and policies, there could be another explosion. That was their main reason for not wanting to go back.”
After many of the men raised concerns about unsafe working conditions, 258 were arrested and imprisoned on a large barge moored at the pier.
They were threatened with prosecution, court-martial and execution if they refused to return to work and continue loading ammunition.
After being threatened with execution, 208 sailors returned to work. However, 50 sailors continued to refuse. Those 50 were charged with mutiny. The remaining 208 were charged with failure to obey a lawful order. All were put on trial in what was, according to naval historians, the largest mass mutiny trial in naval history.
On October 24, 1944, after an 80-minute jury deliberated, the 50 sailors were found guilty of mutiny and sentenced to up to 15 years’ hard labor.
Thurgood Marshall, then general counsel for the NAACP, appealed the case, arguing that the segregated Navy had denied the sailors a fair trial.
After appeals and widespread protests, the “Port Chicago Fifty,” as they came to be known, were released from prison in January 1946, but their convictions remained on their records.
President Bill Clinton pardoned one of the sailors, Frederick Meeks, in 1999. “Many of the other survivors and family members were not interested in pardons because accepting one would mean admitting guilt,” said Capt. Kyle Hunton, a spokesman for the secretary of the Navy. “They did not believe they were guilty.”
Del Toro said the decision to acquit the sailors means a conviction has been cleared away. “Based on the evidence we found, this is simply the right decision,” he said. “The 50 Port Chicago men, and the hundreds who stood with them, are no longer with us, but their story lives on – a testament to the enduring power of courage and the unwavering pursuit of justice.”
