Admiral Osterhaus instructed Joe Small and the forty-nine other seamen to stand. Small’s heart felt as if it would jump from his chest. The admiral adjusted his reading glasses and cleared his throat and instructed Lieutenant Commander Coakley to record the court’s findings. Then he read the verdict for each of the fifty seamen: “The specification of the charge proved. And the accused [name of seaman] is of the charge guilty.”
By the time Osterhaus reached Seaman Second Class Freddie Meeks, it must have been obvious to Lieutenant Veltmann that the court would find all of the seamen guilty. Perhaps he had hoped for too much. Perhaps it was too much to expect that a decorated World War I veteran would view the seamen as anything but cowards.
Charles Gray surely regretted his decision to cast his lot with the fifty mutineers. Perhaps he should have joined his brother Joseph and avoided the confrontation. In the end, the Navy had asserted its might, and what had he, or the others, gained? Now their only hope was that when the court sent the findings to Admiral Wright, he would find an ounce of mercy in his heart and not follow through on his promise to have them shot.
Alphonso McPherson feared that his reputation as a malingerer and a troublemaker had come back to haunt him. Perhaps he should have restrained himself when the Admiral asked if he had anything more to say. What good could come from impugning the integrity of a Navy officer, especially the judge advocate?
For Joe Small the verdict was hardly unexpected. He felt that from the moment it began, the trial was rigged. Fifty black men could not get a fair hearing in a military court.
Before adjourning, Admiral Osterhaus announced the seamen’s sentences. Although no one would stand before a firing squad, the punishment was extreme. Each man’s rank was reduced to apprentice seaman; each one was sentenced to a period of confinement and hard labor of fifteen years; and finally, each, after serving his sentence, was to be dishonorably discharged from the United States Navy and, as Admiral Osterhaus said, made “to suffer all the accessories of said sentence, as prescribed by Section 622, Naval Courts and Boards.”
Fifteen years was a chunk of life, but some of the men were young enough that perhaps they were able to comfort themselves with the fact that even after a decade and a half in a military prison, they would have something to look forward to. For the few who were married or had children, the sentence tore out their hearts. Eventually they would be released. In the meantime who would support their families?
But it was the last phrase—“to suffer all the accessories of said sentence”—that haunted each of the fifty men. They would lose all their rights and benefits as veterans. And what employer would hire a man who had been dishonorably discharged from the Navy? Had they also disgraced black America? In every practical sense, their lives were over.
CHAPTER 39
The Sins of a Nation
Following the trial, five Port Chicago seamen who had risked their lives to keep a fire from spreading on the night of the explosion received the Navy and Marine Corps Medal. The irony of five black seamen being awarded the United States Department of the Navy’s second-highest noncombatant medal just days after fifty black seamen were convicted of mutiny was not lost on Thurgood Marshall, who penned a scathing piece on the trial for the November issue of The Crisis, the NAACP’s official magazine. In the editorial he called the mutiny charge a “frame-up” and accused the Navy of charging the men “solely because of their race and color.” He also criticized Admiral Osterhaus for his prejudicial handling of the case and the mere eighty minutes it took his court to reach a verdict. Did fifty black men mean so little to him and to the other Navy officers that they devoted a mere one and a half minutes to the fate of each defendant?
Now that the verdict and sentences had been handed down, black publications and civil rights groups vented their outrage. The president of the San Francisco branch of the NAACP fumed, “The Negro people are well aware of the pattern of discrimination practiced by the Navy, and they are very much concerned about this trial. I feel that a general investigation of the policies which led up to this thing should be made at once.”
The Crisis and other black publications ran scathing editorials of the mutiny trial, highlighting the second-class treatment of blacks in the military and its courts. The NAACP organized protests, circulated petitions, and contacted prominent public figures, including Eleanor Roosevelt. Mrs. Roosevelt was keenly aware of the situation and wrote Secretary Forrestal a brief note, making it clear that her sympathies lay with the men. It “seems a sad story,” she said. “I hope in the case of these boys special care will be taken.” She enclosed the “Mutiny” pamphlet that the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund had written about the case.
Even the editors of the San Francisco Chronicle, which had been reporting on the trial since it began, felt impelled to comment on the severity of the sentences. “We have been mulling this matter over for several days,” they wrote. “These Negroes who refused to load the munitions ships … were plainly overcome by fear. They were not per se mutineers except to the extent that their fear overcame whatever responsibility they had. Considering then that fear and failure to do a duty because of it, cannot be encouraged in war-time, we still believe that the sentences imposed on these men were altogether too severe. We do not believe that the honor of the United States Navy … would have been impaired by sentences ranging from one-half to one-third of those given.”
For Percy Robinson, George Booth, and the other 206 men who agreed to handle ammunition after Admiral Wright threatened to put all resisters before a firing squad, the two and a half months between the time they were imprisoned at Camp Shoemaker’s South Stockade and the end of the trial passed painfully. Some who had been called to testify at the trial of their fellow seamen brought back news of the proceedings, but for the most part Robinson and Booth and the others heard nothing. Assigned to work crews, they fashioned cargo nets from rough, one-inch-thick hemp fiber ropes. Daily quotas were steep, and the men worked mind-numbing ten-hour shifts, twisting and lacing the rope until their hands grew sore and bloody.
On October 26, two days after Osterhaus’s court reached its verdict regarding the mutineers, and ninety days after they were first imprisoned, Percy Robinson and the other 207 men were transferred from Camp Shoemaker to Treasure Island. At the island’s de-embarkation camp, they awaited their orders. Soon they learned that they were being sent to the Pacific for the “duration of the war.” Some of the men were thrilled that they were going to the combat zone and might finally see some action. Percy Robinson was sensible enough to know that the Navy had no grand plans for a bunch of court-martialed black seamen. None of them would serve aboard a destroyer or a battleship or a cruiser. They would be assigned to munitions ships or to bases where they would perform the mule work that white servicemen wanted no part of.
That same day an article appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle. NIMITZ’S SECRET WEAPON, the headline read. PACIFIC FLEET SERVICE SENDS MUNITIONS, FUEL AND FOOD OVER TREMENDOUS DISTANCES TO OUR SHIPS. The gist of the story was that without the extraordinary efforts of America’s military and civilian workers to meet the staggering demands of the U.S. Fleet and its ground troops, the war in the Pacific could not have been waged successfully. The story quoted a staff member for the Service Squadron for the Pacific Fleet who boasted that the Saipan invasion alone demanded more fuel (and more of everything else) than the entire Pacific Fleet used in 1943.
In mid-November, Admiral Wright, who had been reviewing the findings of the Osterhaus court, acknowledged that there had been “erroneous rulings on questions of evidence present in the record.” Nevertheless, he determined that they “did not affect the validity of the proceedings, and did not prejudice the rights of the accused.” In view of “their youth, clear records, and short periods of service,” Wright reduced the sentence to eight years for five of the defendants. For eleven others, including Edward Longmire, who had butted heads with the lieutenant at Camp Shoemaker over his statement, he red
uced the sentence to ten years. For another twenty-four of the seamen, including Charles Gray, he took off three years. But for Small and another nine seamen, including Ollie Green and Alphonso McPherson, Wright would not budge.
Thurgood Marshall was determined to stick with the case, and when he returned to New York he made his report to Secretary Forrestal. He had only attended the trial for twelve days, but in that short time he had developed a disturbing picture of the situation at Port Chicago. Why, he asked the secretary, was all the loading done by blacks, and why were they not sufficiently trained? Why, also, after suffering through such a traumatic event, were the seamen not allowed survivor’s leave?
Forrestal’s answers were ambiguous and evasive. Regarding the denial of survivor’s leave, he said that “requiring men to immediately return to handling ammunition, after an explosion, is the preferred method of preventing them from building up mental and emotional barriers which … become increasingly difficult to overcome.” He did not say why many of the white officers who had survived the blast were given leave.
In early December, the editors of the Pittsburgh Courier wrote an article titled “Fifty New Martyrs.”
The Pittsburgh Courier is not disposed to ever condone crime or disobedience of military orders. Men and women in the Armed Services promptly should obey the orders given them, no matter how distasteful or repugnant those orders may be, especially when the Nation is at war.
But we cannot dismiss the feeling that the fifty Negro sailors in California, who have just received sentences ranging from eight to fifteen years on one specification of mutiny for refusing to load ammunition after scores of their comrades had been killed and injured in the disastrous Port Chicago explosion, are, in a sense, martyrs. The boys went into the Navy expecting to receive the same treatment as other seamen and hoping to be able to strike a blow for democracy. Instead they found themselves doing the arduous, unsung, undistinguished and dirty work of laborers and stevedores with no hope whatever of getting transfers to active, military service. Their experience taught them that they were not in a democratic institution, but a jim-crow institution where colored men could do only the dirtiest and most dangerous work without any of the compensation derived by white boys of their same age and rank. It is easy to understand their state of mind when they saw their buddies blown to bits and were asked to take the same chances they took. Fed up with their status as second-class citizens fighting in a first-class war, they could see no reason why they should risk their lives for little or no reward. True, they should have done as they were ordered, as all good sailors and soldiers should, but all of us can understand why they balked, and to that extent they are martyrs, paying the penalty for the sins of a Nation. This sorry case should be a warning to the Navy to change its racial policy and to give colored youths the same opportunity to serve as white youths and alongside them, rather than in jim-crow units.
Days later, Joe Small and the forty-nine other mutineers were jailed at the Terminal Island Disciplinary Barracks in San Pedro, California, just outside of Long Beach, to serve out their sentences. The men were put in separate cells to discourage any sense of unity that might develop among them. Nevertheless, they were often assigned to the same work details and stuck together as best they could. Guards and other prisoners referred to them as the “Port Chicago Boys,” presumably with a mixture of awe, pity, and fear, as if to say, “Here are the men who had the guts (or the temerity) to take on the United States Navy.” Rather than being sullen and bitter, the seamen held on to a ray of hope that Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP, which they had given written permission to file an appeal brief, might succeed in their efforts to have the convictions reversed or the sentences reduced further when the case came up for review before the judge advocate general (JAG) of the Navy.
In early 1945, Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP stepped up their pressure on the Navy. Marshall filed a twenty-four-page appeal brief in which he charged the Navy with initiating a “mass prosecution … calculated to dispose of a large group of men with one swoop.” The trial of fifty men, he argued, “militates against our whole traditional concept of personal guilt.” Then he accused the Navy of “callous disregard of even perfunctory justice,” suggesting that “the prosecution in an effort to establish the requisite intent necessary to sustain the charge of mutiny was permitted over objection of accused (Lieutenant Veltmann) to introduce [inadmissible] testimony as to certain statements made by unidentified individuals.”
Secretary Forrestal’s office asked Admiral F. L. Lowe, the assistant judge advocate general, to review Marshall’s appeal. In a letter that underscored the Navy’s nagging uncertainty about whether the Port Chicago incident constituted mutiny, and whether the case had been prosecuted justly, the secretary’s office impressed upon Admiral Lowe the importance of being “painstaking and thorough so that the secretary’s action will be unassailable.” Then it posed a series of questions that it wanted Lowe to investigate: “Can disobedience of one order, but obedience to all others constitute mutiny?” “Can there be mutiny when guards are not overridden?” “Did the giving of an individual order to each accused have the legal effect of terminating the ‘conspiracy’ or ‘concerted action’?” “If ‘concerted action’ or ‘conspiracy’ is an essential element, was such first made out prima facie before statements and acts of co-actors were admitted?”
That spring, Thurgood Marshall met with Admiral Lowe in Washington. Now in person, he asked, “Why is it that whenever more than one Negro disobeys an order, it is mutiny?” Then he pointed out that the fifty seamen had obeyed all other orders. “At best,” he told the admiral, “it is a refusal to obey an order.” He also accused Lieutenant Commander Coakley of having “misled the court—deliberately.” His conduct, Marshall said, amounted to a “complete violation of Navy Courts and Boards.” Before leaving Admiral Lowe’s office, he suggested that justice could only be achieved by overturning the convictions.
Admiral Lowe may have been sympathetic to Marshall’s argument. But the Navy’s reputation was on the line. How could it not uphold the convictions of what it had billed as the largest mass trial in the history of the Navy and the first of its kind during World War II?
On May 17, 1945, six and a half months after the Osterhaus court reached its verdict, the Department of the Navy sent a memorandum to Admiral Wright instructing him to order Admiral Osterhaus to reconvene his court for the purpose of reconsidering the findings and sentences in the Port Chicago mutiny trial. “The Secretary of the Navy,” the letter began, “notes that in a number of instances throughout the case for the prosecution evidence was admitted concerning alleged declarations made by various unidentified individuals.” It then went on to cite over forty occasions on which Judge Advocate Coakley, under the principle of res gestae, introduced hearsay testimony for the purpose of proving the existence of a mutiny. “The admission in evidence of the testimony,” the letter continued, “was in error … and therefore should have been stricken by the court from the record.… You will inform the court that in its reconsideration of its findings, wholly disregarding the above evidence, the court will reconsider whether the prosecution has proven beyond a reasonable doubt … the existence of the specific intent to usurp, subvert, or override superior military authority.… Simple violence or disobedience of orders … is not mutiny.”
The Osterhaus court met for a total of five hours, and then, on June 12, 1945, it declared that it would change neither its findings nor the sentences. A spokesman for the secretary of the Navy defended Osterhaus, saying, “The trials were conducted fairly and impartially.… Racial discrimination was guarded against.”
After the Osterhaus court insisted that it would adhere to its verdict, Thurgood Marshall demanded a face-to-face meeting with the secretary, but Forrestal refused. The trial had clearly become a “hot potato for the Navy” and had generated enough bad publicity. Port Chicago was best forgotten.
Just over two months later, Emperor Hirohito announc
ed to his nation Japan’s surrender, and voices inside Secretary Forrestal’s Department of the Navy encouraged clemency for all of America’s imprisoned servicemen. Now that the war with Japan was over, they argued that many of the sentences, especially in the case of Port Chicago seamen, seemed unjustifiably harsh.
The following month the Navy acted, reducing all the mutineers’ sentences by one year. Lester Granger, Secretary Forrestal’s special adviser on race relations, however, was not satisfied with what he considered a pro-forma cut. He continued to push for leniency for the Port Chicago fifty, while arguing that the Navy needed to resolve its racial problems in general by providing equal treatment and opportunity for blacks. Chief of Naval Personnel Admiral Louis Denfeld backed Granger, pointing out that the admission of Negroes to the auxiliary fleet had caused few problems. Denfield reminded Secretary Forrestal that he and Admiral King had agreed to use Negroes throughout the entire fleet if the preliminary program proved practical. The time, he said, had come to honor that agreement.
In mid-October 1945, a confidential memo regarding the Port Chicago sentences circulated throughout the Navy Department. The author affirmed the convictions, but advised reducing the sentences “to three years for those with previous record of minor misconduct, and two years for those with previous clear records.” The author also urged the Navy to regard the Port Chicago incident as an object lesson underscoring the importance of discipline in the labor battalions.
In January 1946 the efforts by men like Lester Granger paid off. Quietly the Navy Department agreed to release the Port Chicago men from prison and to erase the remainder of their sentences. The seamen were then broken into small groups and assigned to vessels bound for the South Pacific for what was called a “probationary period.” The move both pleased and irked Thurgood Marshall. He would later say, “The conclusion of that case was extremely interesting, because there was no official notice of what happened. The records of the final disposition were never entered, but I happen to know … that all of the men were released, and put back onto active duty in the Pacific. But there’s no record in the Navy Department about it.”
The Color of War Page 36
