In sultry noontime heat and humidity, the short black woman in the starched white uniform stood ramrod straight at a podium Friday and thanked the small cadre of older black men seated on metal benches before her.
“You have all made it possible for me to be here before you today with the admiral’s stripe,” said Rear Adm. Lillian B. Fishburne, the first black woman appointed by the Secretary of Navy to flag officer status.
The pride of Fishburne, 50, was unmistakable. But so was that of the older men, mostly in their mid-70s, assembled at the U.S. Navy Memorial, an uninspired and cold monument right across the street from the U.S. Justice Department and National Archive.
Her father, Fishburne told them, was one of the first hospital foremen in the Navy. And, just like them, in the early 1940s, her dad had trained at Great Lakes, outside Chicago.
The men came up to Fishburne after the brief ceremony and congratulated her. “It’s an honor,” said Louis Perkins, a biologist-botanist and longtime professor at Howard University, who volunteered for duty as an 18-year-old at the Gulfport, Miss., draft board after Pearl Harbor.
Yet there was one matter Fishburne would not mention, either in her brisk remarks or later when I approached her. It was, after all, the reason this dwindling and proud group was here, boosting a cause with which the Navy formally disagrees even if it graciously sent the lady admiral as an emissary.
It’s the “mutiny” at Port Chicago, an event calling out for some response. But there aren’t many left to call out or many interested in listening, including Fishburne’s bosses.
Just like the membership of this group, the World War II Black Veterans of Great Lakes, the memory of and interest in what happened on a loading dock just north of San Francisco on July 17, 1944, are dwindling.
For sure, there have been magazine articles, at least one book and “Mutiny,” an NBC prime-time movie produced by actor Morgan Freeman a few months ago. But the book wasn’t a big seller and the movie didn’t draw many viewers. Even a California congressman, Democratic Rep. George Miller, who’s helping the group’s cause, sent an aide to Friday’s ceremony in his stead.
Inattention aside, the tale is fairly straightforward and profound.
The armed forces were segregated. The dirty job of loading munitions was left to blacks. Those assigned to Port Chicago, one of the largest depots on the West Coast, had not been specifically trained to handle ammunition.
They complained about their circumstances and anxieties. They complained about the act of “racing,” namely contests white officers engaged in to see whose black crew could load a ship faster. The officers had money bets going, with the black grunts who lost denied certain privileges.
On the cloudless night of July 17, 1944, two merchant ships were at Port Chicago, being prepared for duty in the increasingly active Pacific front. At 10:18 p.m. there were two gigantic explosions whose seismic shock was akin to an atomic bomb and was felt in Boulder City, Nev.
“I was talking to a buddy of mine in the barracks, about a mile away,” recalled Eugene Sayles, 74. “It knocked him clear out of the top bunk and threw me up against the lockers on the other side of the room. The glass from the windows peppered my back.”
There were 320 men on duty that evening and they apparently were killed instantly. Of the 320, 208 were blacks, meaning that 15 percent of the black soldiers killed during World War II died that evening as flames shot 12,000 feet in the air during the war’s worst homefront accident. One of those two ships blown to smithereens had weighed 72,000 tons.
A military inquiry could not determine the cause, though some believe a crane whose brakes had failed inspection dropped several detonator-loaded munitions right onto the dock. The investigation run by whites cleared the white officers while indirectly bad-mouthing and blaming the black victims.
The black sailors, the inquiry concluded, “are neither intellectually nor temperamentally capable of handling high explosives.”
I read those words shortly after spending time Thursday night chatting in a hotel with Perkins, the biologist-botanist who did high-level work at the National Institutes of Health, and with James Peters of Storrs, Conn., another member of the Great Lakes group. Peters is a clinical psychologist and author who did graduate work at the University of Chicago and has graduate degrees from Purdue University and the Illinois Institute of Technology.
Clearly, these guys weren’t “intellectually capable” of challenges such as handling explosives.
And the blacks who survived the explosion at Port Chicago obviously weren’t “intellectually capable” of realizing that they should go right back to loading ammunition.
Within days the Navy was ordering them to do so at nearby Mare Island. After 258 refused, the Navy locked them in a barge. Several days later, 208 agreed to go back to work, though given summary courts-martial and time in the stockade.
The 50 who did not return were then charged with mutiny.
Despite a vigorous defense by white military attorneys and Thurgood Marshall, then with the NAACP and a future U.S. Supreme Court justice, it was to no avail. The all-white judges spent less than 90 minutes deliberating each of the 50 cases and found them guilty. They were sentenced to as much as 15 years in prison.
While the war’s end brought President Harry Truman’s general amnesty for all convicted soldiers, the Port Chicago group’s mutiny convictions were not expunged from their records.
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“I’m here because I think justice should be served. These people did not deserve mistreatment. They should be exonerated,” said Junius Mills, a retired postal worker from Whitman, Mass., who trained at Great Lakes and served at a naval ammunitions depot in Hingham, Mass., during the war.
Mills was among the small cadre who sat on steamy benches Friday during an observance that included a Navy color guard, the national anthem, the laying of a wreath and the playing of taps. They sat with scant rancor. Indeed, they were a bunch of military vets, gratified to have served, happy to swap memories.
“I do have a great sense of accomplishment. I volunteered, was told I was physically unfit but persevered and did serve,” said Perkins, who trained at Great Lakes and was assigned to cleaning work in Corpus Christi, Texas, before moving to a crash rescue unit (“Hell, the Navy didn’t even teach me to swim and there I was on crash boats!”).
As best anyone can tell, there may be as few as two men alive among the 50 who were convicted. One of them, Californian Fred Meeks, is formally seeking exoneration with a request to President Clinton pushed along by Miller. The second man doesn’t want to relive that part of his life in any way.
When I asked the Navy to respond, it dusted off a Jan. 6, 1994, statement of two paragraphs. A review back then concluded that “the courts-martial were properly conducted. . . . Additional remedial action is not warranted.”
There were a few other reporters, mostly local television folks, at the Navy Memorial. Little interest was elicited among tourists ambling along Pennsylvania Avenue.
“Mr. President, please hear us,” said master of ceremonies Yale Lewis, a longtime television and radio technician here who was assigned to Midway Island during the war and on April 1, 1945, helped take the Marines into Okinawa.
Well, at least somebody brought up the matter at the daily White House press briefing several hours later.
The second-string spokesman, summoning all his bureaucratic sincerity and magnanimity, declared that the pardon request for Meeks is “being considered under the usual process at the Justice Department, and obviously the president will give careful consideration to that.”
Obviously.
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James Warren and Michael Tackett of the Tribune’s Washington bureau are hosts of “Unconventional Wisdom” at 7:05 p.m. Sunday on WGN-AM 720.