Port Chicago 50: Joe Small, the 1944 Explosion and the Navy Mutiny Trial

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In 1944 Joseph Randolph Small was a winch operator in Division Four at the Port Chicago Naval Magazine on Suisun Bay near San Francisco, one of many African American sailors trained at Naval Station Great Lakes but assigned as stevedores loading munitions in a segregated Navy. The episode describes a workforce with no formal explosives training, officers under Captain Merrill T. Kinney with little munitions experience, a chalkboard tracking tonnage while junior officers bet on which division loaded fastest, and a winch with a broken brake. On July 17, 1944, at 10:18 p.m., two blasts destroyed the SS E.A. Bryan and the SS Quinault Victory, registering 3.4 on UC Berkeley seismographs and killing 320 men, 202 of them African American sailors.

After cleanup duty that included recovering remains, the survivors were ordered back to loading while white officers received 30-day survivors' leave. On August 9, 328 men refused to march to the USS Sangay, and 258 held out and were confined on a barge built for 75. Officers asked Small to keep order, and his words urging the men to stick together became the prosecution's centerpiece. After Admiral Wright threatened a firing squad, 50 men held firm and faced the largest mass trial in Navy history on Treasure Island, where prosecutor James F. Coakley equated collective refusal with mutiny. Thurgood Marshall came for the NAACP, and after 80 minutes of deliberation all 50 were convicted. On July 17, 2024, the Secretary of the Navy exonerated all 256 men in the work stoppage.

• The explosion accounted for 15 percent of all African American casualties in World War II, and nearly 400 more were injured.
• The cargo that night included 1,000-pound bombs, fused incendiaries and shock-sensitive Torpex depth charges.
• Small testified that he urged no rebellion, and decades later admitted his words on the barge were more defiant than he said in court.
• Declassified transcripts note that lead judge Admiral Osterhaus routinely fell asleep during defense arguments.
• Eleanor Roosevelt pressed the Navy, 47 of the 50 were released in January 1946, and the Navy began desegregating that February.