80 Years After WWII Disaster, Navy Exonerates Black Sailors

The US Navy has exonerated 256 Black sailors who were found to be unjustly punished in 1944 following a horrific port explosion that killed hundreds of service members and exposed racist double standards among the then-segregated ranks, the AP reports.

• On July 17, 1944, munitions being loaded onto a cargo ship detonated, causing secondary blasts that ignited 5,000 tons of explosives at Port Chicago naval weapons station near San Francisco. The explosion killed 320 sailors and civilians, nearly 75% of whom were Black, and injured another 400 personnel. Surviving Black sailors had to pick up the human remains and clear the blast site while white officers were granted leave to recuperate.

• The pier was a critical ammunition supply site for forces in the Pacific during World War II, and the job of loading those ships was left primarily to Black enlisted sailors overseen by white officers.
• Before the explosion, the Black sailors working the dock had expressed concerns about the loading operations. Shortly after the blast, they were ordered to return to loading ships even though no changes had been made to improve their safety. The sailors refused, saying they needed training on how to more safely handle the bombs before they returned.
• What followed affected the rest of their lives, including punishments that kept them from receiving honorable discharges even as the vast majority returned to work at the pier under immense pressure and served throughout the war. Fifty sailors who held fast to their demands for safety and training were tried as a group on charges of conspiracy to commit mutiny and were convicted and sent to prison.

• The whole episode was unjust, and none of the sailors received the legal due process they were owed, Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro said in an interview with the AP. It was "a horrific situation for those Black sailors that remained," Del Toro said. The Navy's office of general counsel reviewed the military judicial proceedings used to punish the sailors and found "there were so many inconsistencies and so many legal violations that came to the forefront," he said.
• Thurgood Marshall, who was then a defense attorney for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, defended the 50 sailors who were convicted of mutiny. Marshall went on to become the first Black justice on the Supreme Court.
• On Wednesday, the 80th anniversary of the Port Chicago disaster, Del Toro signed paperwork officially clearing the sailors, who are now deceased. Del Toro handed the first pen to Thurgood Marshall Jr., the late justice's son.
• The exonerations "are deeply moving," Marshall Jr. said. "They, of course, are all gone, and that's a painful aspect of it. But so many fought for so long for that kind of fairness and recognition."
• President Biden said the decision to exonerate is "righting a historic wrong." In the appeal of their courts martial convictions, then-NAACP attorney Marshall wrote that "justice can only be done in this case by a complete reversal of findings," Biden said in a statement. "With this action, we are answering that call."

(More World War II stories.)