The Black sailors at Port Chicago had voiced their safety concerns numerous times over the prior year. Little remained of a carpenter shop on the pier at Port Chicago after the building was leveled by the explosion of two munitions ships the evening of July 17, 1944. This article is a selection from the September issue of Smithsonian magazine Buy Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $12 When he returned to Port Chicago after the explosion and found all of his buddies had been killed, he said, “something just snapped” within him. “Man, it was awful.You’d see a shoe with a foot in it.You’d see a head floating across the water-just the head or an arm.just awful.That thing kept you from sleeping at night.” One of the seamen had been home in San Diego on leave after his wife gave birth to their son. “I was there the next morning,” Crittenden recalled in an interview with historian Robert Allen. All of them were shaken by what they witnessed. Sailors raced to help injured crewmates and fought fires that could have triggered additional explosions. It was the worst home-front disaster of the war. Three hundred and twenty people died, including 202 Black enlisted sailors. All the people on the pier, aboard the two naval ships, and on a nearby Coast Guard fire barge were killed instantly. Only tiny fragments of another ship, the E. One ship, the Quinault Victory, was lifted out of the water, spun around and shattered into pieces. Then some guys came by in a truck, and we went down to the dock, but when we got there, we didn’t see no dock, no ship, no nothing.”

“People running and hollering.Finally, they got the emergency light together. “Everybody felt at that point that it was another Pearl Harbor,” said Jack Crittenden, a 19-year-old seaman from Montgomery, Alabama. Sailors sleeping in their barracks a mile and a half from the port thought they were under attack from Japanese bombers. People throughout the Bay Area awoke to something that felt like an earthquake-a blast with the force of five kilotons of TNT. The definitive history of World War II from the African American perspective, written by civil rights expert and Dartmouth history professor Matthew Delmont Buy Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad on July 17, 1944, it proved deadly.Īfrican American sailors’ requests to receive the training necessary to properly handle bombs and other forms of ammunition were ignored.

It was dangerous work, and shortly after 10 p.m. Sometimes the bombs were wedged so snuggly in the boxcars that the sailors struggled to loosen them safely. Every day they transferred hundreds of tons of bombs and shells from railroad boxcars to the ships. Navy ammunition depot at Port Chicago, on Suisun Bay some 36 miles northeast of San Francisco, Black seamen worked in shifts around the clock loading ships bound for the Pacific. Delmont, a historian at Dartmouth College, chronicles the service members’ struggles-including a momentous but largely forgotten Navy catastrophe that, he says, “helped force the Navy and the larger military to desegregate.”Īt the U.S. In a new book, Half American, Matthew F. But even as they battled foreign enemies that threatened our democracy, at home these men and women found themselves fighting the same racism and segregation they had endured as civilians. military during World War II, hoping their patriotism and courage would prove them worthy of the nation’s promise of equity for all people. Many African Americans were eager to serve in the U.S.

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