The court deliberated for eighty minutes and convicted all fifty sailors of mutiny.

July 17, 1944. 10:18 p.m.
38.0575° N, 122.0297° W

JUDGE ADVOCATE, COURT OF INQUIRY
The loading of explosives should never be a matter of competition.

LT. CMDR. JAMES COAKLEY
What kind of discipline, what kind of morale would we have if men in the United States Navy could refuse to obey an order and then get off on the grounds of fear?

THURGOOD MARSHALL
This is not 50 men on trial for mutiny. This is the Navy on trial for its whole vicious policy toward Negroes.

Shortly after Pearl Harbor, the Navy selected a stretch of waterfront on Suisun Bay, northeast of San Francisco, for a new munitions depot. Port Chicago Naval Magazine was built to supplement the existing facility at Mare Island, and by 1944 it was the largest transshipment point for naval munitions on the West Coast. Bombs, depth charges, torpedoes, and crated ammunition bound for the Pacific theater passed through it by the shipload. The ordnance arrived by rail, was unloaded onto a wooden pier that stretched 1,200 feet into the bay, and was hoisted by cargo net and winch into the holds of waiting ships. The pier ran day and night. Ships came in, took on their loads, and sailed for the war. The town that shared the base's name sat just outside the fence, small and flat, defined by the work that happened on the other side of it.

The men who did the loading were African American enlisted sailors, approximately 1,400 of them, assigned to the labor under the Navy's wartime segregation policy. Every officer at the facility was white. Seventy-one officers oversaw the operation, supported by 106 Marine guards and 230 civilian employees. The work was physical and unrelenting. Shells, bombs, and incendiary clusters came off railcars and had to be carried, rolled, or guided by cargo net into the ship holds below. The men worked eight-hour shifts, six loading days out of every eight. None of them had received formal training in the handling of explosives. The Navy had no standardized procedure for munitions loading. The Coast Guard had published safety instructions on the subject in 1943, and the instructions were routinely ignored at Port Chicago. There was no manual in the men's hands and no certification on their records. They learned from the man standing beside them, and the man beside them had learned the same way.

Captain Nelson Goss, the commanding officer at Mare Island and Port Chicago's direct superior, set the loading target at ten tons of munitions per hatch per hour. Commercial stevedores working in peacetime with nonexplosive cargo did not regularly match that rate. The men at Port Chicago were expected to beat it every shift.

On November 1, 1943, Captain Goss wrote a letter to the Coast Guard informing them that their explosives-loading inspection details were no longer welcome at Port Chicago or at Mare Island. The inspectors stopped coming. The sailors on the pier were told that the munitions they handled were not armed and could not detonate without their fuses. Some of the munitions the men carried, including incendiary clusters, were loaded with their fuses already in place. Joe Small, a seaman first class who was twenty-three years old, complained to his commanding officer about the speed of the loading and the way men were rushed through each hold. He was told the bombs were safe.

In April 1944, Captain Merrill T. Kinne took command of Port Chicago Naval Magazine and ordered a blackboard hung in the dock office. On it, each day, a clerk chalked the tonnage that each division had loaded during its shift. Kinne had drawn the idea from Navy target practice scoring. The numbers went up where every officer and enlisted man could see them. A division that fell behind one day saw its number posted the next morning beside the division that had outpaced it. Officers placed bets on which division would move the most ordnance. The fastest crews earned free movie screenings. The slowest were threatened with punishment. Kinne himself had no training in munitions handling. Neither did anyone serving under him. The blackboard turned the movement of live bombs into a contest, and the contest had an audience. The Navy's own inquiry, when it came, would have a single sentence to say about that blackboard.

The SS E. A. Bryan docked at Port Chicago's pier on July 13, 1944. Loading began immediately. Bombs, depth charges, shells, and small arms ammunition went into her holds over the next four days. By the evening of July 17, 4,606 tons of munitions were aboard the ship or stacked on the pier beside her. That same morning, a second vessel had arrived. The SS Quinault Victory was a brand-new cargo ship, in port for her maiden voyage. She was moored alongside the Bryan, being readied to take on her own load. On the pier, sixteen railcars stood packed with another 429 tons of ordnance waiting to be moved. The pier was full. Both ships were open. The night shift was working.

At 10:18 p.m. on July 17, 1944, men on the base and in the surrounding towns heard a hollow, metallic clang and the sound of splintering wood from the direction of the pier. A blinding white flash followed, and then a detonation. Seconds later, a second and far larger blast tore outward from the same point. The explosion registered 3.4 on the Richter scale. It was felt more than four hundred miles away, as far as the state of Nevada. Windows shattered in towns on both sides of the strait. The concussion knocked men off their feet in barracks across the base and in houses along the waterfront. A pillar of fire and smoke rose over the bay and was visible for miles in every direction.

The E. A. Bryan was gone. Not sunk. Disintegrated. The largest remaining fragments of the ship were the size of a suitcase. The Quinault Victory, still awaiting her first cargo, was blown apart and sank in the bay. The 1,200-foot wooden pier ceased to exist. A Coast Guard fire barge moored at the waterfront sank with its five-man crew. Three hundred and twenty men were killed. Two hundred and two of them were African American enlisted sailors. Three hundred and ninety more were injured. The blast was so complete that only 51 of the 320 dead could be identified. The rest were classified as missing. In a single night, the explosion at a loading dock on Suisun Bay accounted for fifteen percent of all African American naval casualties in the entire Second World War.

In the days that followed, the Navy granted its white officers thirty-day survivor leave. The African American enlisted survivors received no leave. They were sent back to the waterfront to pull wreckage from the water, to collect debris along the shore, and to search for the remains of the men they had worked beside. When the cleanup was finished, the survivors were transferred to Mare Island and informed that they would be assigned to resume loading ammunition at another facility.

A Court of Inquiry convened on July 21, four days after the explosion. Captain Albert G. Cook Jr. presided. The proceedings ran for thirty-nine days and took testimony from 120 witnesses. Five of those witnesses were African American enlisted men. None came from the group that would later refuse to resume loading. The court produced a report of approximately 1,200 pages. It cleared every white officer of any culpability. It offered no conclusive finding as to the cause of the detonation. In the report's final recommendations, the Judge Advocate wrote one sentence that addressed the blackboard, the betting, and the pace: "the loading of explosives should never be a matter of competition." That single line was the only official acknowledgment that the contest Kinne had created and Goss had enabled bore any connection to the deaths of 320 men.

On August 9, 1944, three weeks after the inquiry opened, 328 African American sailors were assembled at Mare Island and ordered to resume loading ammunition. Two hundred and fifty-eight of them refused. The next day, Rear Admiral Carleton H. Wright addressed the men. He warned them that their refusal constituted mutiny under military law and gave them a choice: return to the loading docks or face prosecution. Two hundred and eight went back. Fifty did not. Joe Small, the seaman who had complained about the pace months earlier, was among them. The Navy labeled him a ringleader.

The 208 who returned received summary courts-martial for their initial refusal. Each was given a bad conduct discharge and ordered to forfeit three months' pay. The fifty who still refused were charged with mutiny.

The general court-martial opened on September 14, 1944, at a Marine barracks on Yerba Buena Island in San Francisco Bay. All fifty defendants were tried together in a single proceeding. The lead prosecutor was Lt. Cmdr. James Coakley. The defense was led by Lt. Gerald E. Veltmann. Thurgood Marshall, chief counsel of the NAACP, traveled to California and sat in the gallery for twelve days. He wrote about the case in the national press and published an NAACP pamphlet he titled "Mutiny?" On October 24, 1944, the court returned its verdict. It had deliberated for eighty minutes. All fifty men were convicted. Each was sentenced to fifteen years in prison and a dishonorable discharge.

Thurgood Marshall filed an appeal in April 1945. It was denied.

In January 1946, most of the fifty convicted men were released from prison. They remained in the Navy and eventually received general discharges under honorable conditions. The mutiny convictions stayed on their records.

President Truman signed an executive order desegregating the armed forces in 1948. The Port Chicago case was cited as one of its causes.

Between 1966 and 1968, the federal government purchased the town of Port Chicago itself. The last resident was evicted in 1969. The town was demolished. The site is now inside Military Ocean Terminal Concord.

The Port Chicago Naval Magazine National Memorial was dedicated in 1994, at the edge of Suisun Bay, on the grounds of the active military base. In 1999, President Clinton granted a presidential pardon to Freddie Meeks, one of the surviving members of the fifty.

The memorial sits behind a security gate. Visitors require advance reservation. The names of the 320 dead are etched on granite tablets at the water's edge, near the spot where the pier stood.

On July 17, 2024, eighty years to the day after the explosion, Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro formally exonerated all 256 defendants. Every one of them was already dead.