Berkeley

War, ‘Mutiny’ and Civil Rights: Remembering Port Chicago

Published

11 years ago

July 14, 2014

By Barry Bergman, UC Berkeley News

Just after 10:18 p.m. on July 17, 1944, UC Berkeley seismographs measured what looked like a 3.4-magnitude earthquake. Far from a routine temblor, though, this was a seismic event of a different kind: a ferocious explosion at the Port Chicago naval base, the worst stateside disaster of World War II.

The cargo ship E.A. Bryan, docked at the base east of Martinez on the southern bank of the Sacramento, was loaded with 4,000-plus tons of bombs and ammunition, roughly half its capacity, when it lit up the East Bay skies. With the explosive force of five kilotons of TNT, the blast instantly killed 320 men, 202 of them African American, and injured another 390 military personnel and civilians.

A view of the wrecked pier after the explosion at Port Chicago. The submerged stern of the Quinault Victory is visible at upper right. (U.S. Navy photo, courtesy of Robert Allen)

The Quinault Victory, set to start taking on munitions later that night, was also destroyed, along with the base itself and much of the small town of Port Chicago, more than a mile away. The Bryan was so decimated that its wreckage was never recovered. Neither were most of the bodies.

Aftershocks followed. The explosion led to the six-week trial — and dismayingly swift conviction — of 50 Black sailors, whose refusal to return to loading ammunition was judged by the Navy to be mutiny. But Berkeley sociologist Robert Allen, who spent years poring over records and interviewing Port Chicago

survivors, views the “mutiny” as an act of resistance, best understood in the context of other protests by African American servicemen during wartime, and of the nationwide civil-rights movement it foreshadowed.

“What happened there was what was happening to black labor generally — namely, to be segregated into the most demeaning jobs, the hardest jobs, the lowest-paying jobs,” says Allen, whose 1989 book, “The Port Chicago Mutiny,” sparked a resurrection of public interest in a pivotal moment in the history of U.S. race relations. “That was the history of black labor, going back to sharecropping, the Jim Crow system, all of that. These guys were products of that themselves.”

Allen, a soft-spoken Georgia native and recently retired Berkeley adjunct professor, will moderate a panel discussion at a 70th-anniversary symposium July 17 at Diablo Valley College, near the site of the disaster. A second panel at the event, which will feature speakers including historian Leon Litwack, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Berkeley professor emeritus, will be moderated by John Lawrence, a Berkeley Ph.D. and former chief of staff to East Bay congressman George Miller, with whom he has worked for federal recognition and exoneration for the convicted sailors.

Allen himself was unaware of the case until 1976, when he came across a pamphlet written in 1945 by Thurgood Marshall, a future Supreme Court justice, for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. It began with a question: “Remember Port Chicago?”

Allen read on. The brochure laid out not only the facts of the case, but the broader racial context. All of the roughly 1,400 enlisted men assigned to load ammunition at the base were black, while all the commissioned officers were white. The African American sailors could not become officers, or even transfer laterally to other types of work — including combat, which is why many had volunteered for service in the first place.

“A racially segregated base — here in California,” Allen says, his wonder at the

Robert Allen

discovery still evident. “And segregated by federal law at that.” The sailors, he adds, “were basically locked in a prison called Port Chicago Naval Depot.”

And though neither enlisted men nor officers were trained to handle bombs, they faced constant, round-the-clock pressure to ship ammunition from Port Chicago, built in response to Japan’s 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. The odds of a catastrophic accident were not lost on the men.

After the worst finally happened — an explosion so violent it blew a 440-foot Navy vessel to bits, along with any clues to the accident’s cause — the survivors were understandably fearful of returning to work.

“Keep in mind that half of them are teenagers,” Allen says. “These are kids, terrified of going back to work and getting killed in another explosion.”

Joseph Small, who was 23 when the Bryan blew and respected by most of his younger crewmates, recalled in interviews with Allen how the survivors were expected simply to return to their regular jobs: “The men said, ‘Well, what are you going to do?’ And he said, ‘I’m not going back to the same work under the same conditions under the same officers.’

“That’s the language of a strike. That’s exactly what the stevedores would have said on the waterfront here if they were engaged in a wildcat strike,” Allen says. “But there’s no such thing in the military. And so they get put on trial for mutiny, and for their very lives.”

Labeled a “ringleader,” Small was among the 50 sailors convicted by a panel of admirals. Their defense counsel, a white Navy lieutenant, argued that the men — many of whom acted heroically in the wake of the accident — may have refused to follow orders, but had made no concerted effort to seize command from established military authorities, and so were not guilty of mutiny.

Outside the San Francisco courtroom, meanwhile, Thurgood Marshall was raising broader issues. “This is not 50 men on trial for mutiny,” he declared. “This is the Navy on trial for its whole vicious policy toward Negroes.”

Nonetheless, after barely an hour of deliberation, all 50 men were sentenced to 15 years in prison, to be followed by dishonorable discharge from the Navy. (The end of the war brought their early release.) But they also won a crucial victory.

The notoriety of their plight — which had prompted Eleanor Roosevelt to send a copy of Marshall’s pamphlet to Navy Secretary James Forrestal, with the wish that “in the case of these boys special care will be taken” — led to two white divisions sharing the work of loading ammunition at Port Chicago.

“That’s the very first step in beginning to desegregate the Navy, when they bring in these guys to do the same work that only blacks were doing before,” Allen says

. Over the next year the Navy would permit mixed crews of black and white sailors, though initially limiting black sailors to 10 percent of crews on some auxiliary vessels, and 30 percent at ammunition depots. (The other military branches remained segregated until 1948.)

With the dawn of the postwar era, the explosion and subsequent trial — not to mention their larger significance — were relegated to footnotes in history. “So by the time I was onto it, it was really lost to memory,” Allen says. “And I became interested in trying to find out what had happened.”

It would be 13 years before The Port Chicago Mutiny was completed. Its publication quickly led to an Emmy Award-winning KRON documentary, and then to a spate of other articles, movies and books. (Steve Sheinkin, who recently published a book on the topic for younger readers, is scheduled to speak at Diablo Valley College next week.)

As media attention grew, so did public interest and political efforts to “remember Port Chicago.” Prodded by Lawrence — now a visiting professor at the UC Washington Center — Rep. Miller and others pushed Congress to create the Port Chicago National Memorial at the site of the explosion in 1994, and helped persuade President Clinton to pardon one of the few surviving convicted sailors in 1999.

Yet the Navy has refused to exonerate them, and Allen’s not optimistic about Congress. He’s pinning his hopes on a proclamation by President Obama — and on the spotlight from events like Thursday’s symposium.

Though none of the 50 are still alive, “it would be important to the families to remove this stigma, and it’s important to the nation,” he says. “Because then the nation could say, ‘OK, we understand it. These guys did something that was technically illegal. But they did it in a way that brought about change for the better, just as the civil-rights activists did in the South.’

“The government may not necessarily want to paint them as heroes, but it can no longer paint them as demons,” he adds. “When we look at the process of desegregation in the military, one of its sources is what happened at Port Chicago. We should stop penalizing these sailors for having done something that we now recognize was for the benefit of the country.

“It’s time,” Allen says, “to exonerate these fellows.”

For more details, or to register for the free July 17th event, visit http://portchicagomemorial.org/

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Lawsuit Accuses UC Schools of Giving Preference to Black and Hispanic Students

The lawsuit also alleges UC is violating the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars racial discrimination by federally funded institutions. In response, UC stated that race is not a factor in admissions, as per state law, and that student demographic data is collected only for statistical purposes.

Published

1 month ago

February 17, 2025

Oakland Post

iStock.

By Bo Tefu, California Black Media

A lawsuit filed in federal court accuses the University of California (UC) of racial discrimination in undergraduate admissions, alleging that Black and Latino students are favored over Asian American and white applicants. The lawsuit, filed by the group Students Against Racial Discrimination, claims UC’s admissions policies violate Proposition 209, a state law passed in 1996 that prohibits the consideration of race in public education.

In response, UC stated that race is not a factor in admissions, as per state law, and that student demographic data is collected only for statistical purposes.

Stett Holbrook, a spokesperson for the UC system, said the entity had not been served with the lawsuit.

“If served, we will vigorously defend our admission practices,” said Holbrook.

“We believe this to be a meritless suit that seeks to distract us from our mission to provide California students with a world-class education,” he said.

The complaint criticizes UC’s use of a “holistic” admissions process, arguing it replaces objective academic criteria with subjective considerations that disadvantage certain racial groups. It cites admission rate disparities at UC Berkeley, noting a decrease in Black student admissions from 13% in 2010 to 10% in 2023, compared to an overall drop from 21% to 12%.

The lawsuit follows the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling banning affirmative action in college admissions, which has prompted challenges to race-conscious policies nationwide. The plaintiffs seek a court order preventing UC from collecting racial data in applications and request a federal monitor to oversee admissions decisions.

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Bay Area

Is the Bay Area Prepared for Major Wildfires?

As part of a Smart and Connected Communities project, funded by the National Science Foundation, the team is also developing virtual games that will help educate the public about wildfire readiness. The project is led by Kenichi Soga, the Donald H. McLaughlin Chair in Mineral Engineering and Chancellor’s Professor at Berkeley, and includes faculty collaborators from the Berkeley’s College of Engineering, College of Environmental Design and Rausser College of Natural Resources.

Published

2 months ago

January 25, 2025

Oakland Post

A screen capture from a prototype of a Bolinas evacuation video game created by UC Davis Professor Thomas Maiorana, showing a plume of wildfire smoke above a map of the Marin County town. Courtesy of Paola Lorusso.

A UC Berkeley-led team is using computer simulations to stress-test the region’s disaster preparedness and creating virtual games to educate the public about wildfire safety.

By Kara Manke
UC Berkeley News

As wildfires continue to rage in LA, many San Francisco Bay Area residents are asking themselves if a similar disaster could happen here — and, with haunting photos of abandoned vehicles in the Pacific Palisades still fresh in everyone’s minds, if vulnerable communities are prepared for a rapid evacuation and firefight.

Since 2022, a team of UC Berkeley researchers, in collaboration with scientists at UC Davis and UC Santa Cruz, has been creating highly detailed models of emergency response infrastructure in two Bay Area communities to answer questions like those.

These “digital twins” of Marin and Alameda counties will include communication networks, emergency services and physical infrastructure, as well as information about how different services are operated and managed. The goal of the project is to use these models to simulate wildfire evacuations under different scenarios and identify potential weaknesses.

To learn more about wildfire risk in the Bay Area and how simulations and “mini-games” can help the region prepare, UC Berkeley News spoke with Louise Comfort, project co-principal investigator, professor emerita and project scientist with the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Firefighters work to contain a grass fire that broke out in the Oakland Hills on Oct. 18, 2024. Noah Berger/AP via UC Berkeley News.

UC Berkeley News: Are Bay Area communities at risk of experiencing wildfires as destructive as those currently impacting LA?

Louise Comfort: Absolutely. The Bay Area has a record of experiencing wildfire in the wildland urban interface, or areas where human development intermingles with undeveloped wildland or vegetation, approximately every 20 to 30 years. Bay Area communities have made major investments in training, preparedness and public education since the last major conflagration in 1991, but we have minor fires, such as the Keller Fire in Oakland on Oct. 20. 2024, relatively frequently. Fortunately, a well-trained Oakland Fire Department responded quickly to contain the Keller Fire, but wind-driven wildfire is a continuing threat to the region.

UC Berkeley News: Compared to L.A., does the Bay Area have any particular strengths or weaknesses when it comes to wildfire preparedness, in terms of susceptibility to severe fire, evacuation routes and communication, insurance coverage, etc.?

Louise Comfort: One strength is the emerging consensus among Bay Area cities that they need to collaborate to reduce wildfire risk, and further, that they need to engage residents in this shared task. There is a new regional agreement, formed just in March 2024, among a set of Bay Area jurisdictions to collaborate on wildfire risk reduction. It is called the East Bay Wildfire Coalition of Governments, with nine member jurisdictions and growing. This is an important step for local governments to pool knowledge, information, resources and plans to prepare for wildfires and other natural hazards to which all jurisdictions are exposed.

Bay Area cities are made vulnerable by structural limitations of their transportation network: four bridges, a BART train that runs part way around the Bay, limited roadways among the counties, and specific points of likely congestion. For example, if the Caldecott Tunnel is closed between Alameda and Contra Costa counties, or if the Richmond Bridge is blocked to the North Bay region, evacuation is quickly limited. Evacuation routes are problematic and dependent on other infrastructure systems, electrical power, communications, and gasoline distribution — all of which are vulnerable to wind-driven wildfire.

UC Berkeley News: The Smart and Connected Communities project is creating “digital twins” of two Bay Area cities to understand how they’d perform when evacuating during a natural disaster. What is a digital twin, and how will it help you understand the Bay Area’s preparedness for severe wildfire events?

Louise Comfort: A “digital twin” is a computational model of an existing urban community. It is intended to replicate technical systems of infrastructure, including road networks, water distribution systems and electrical and gasoline distribution systems. It also models how things flow through these different networks: how vehicles travel the road network, how water flows through the network of water pipes, and how electrical power and gasoline travel through their respective distribution systems. We are currently integrating these technical systems with the organizational systems that manage these functions.

The intent is to test out scenarios computationally that are too dangerous or costly to test in real time. We hope to identify the strengths and weaknesses of our present organizational, institutional, and technical infrastructures before an extreme event — wildfire, earthquake, tsunami, atmospheric river rainstorm or flooding — occurs, so we can anticipate possible scenarios for mitigating these risks or respond quickly to reduce the impact when they do.

Louise Comfort: UC Berkeley News: How do you hope to engage communities to build awareness of risks of preparation?

Louise Comfort: We have done a series of semi-structured interviews with community leaders, public managers, and administrators in public organizations, like schools, parks, and hospitals to identify networks of communication and collaboration within communities, as well as gaps in social interaction that limit full community response.

We are working with a talented team of computer scientists at UC Santa Cruz who have developed a series of “mini-games,” or simulated games that illustrate common dilemmas that people face when encountering a wildfire situation. Such simulations enable people to think through dilemmas before the wildfire occurs, identify alternatives for action in a specific context, and connect with neighbors in a shared task of enabling everyone to evacuate safely.

We hope to hold a public community meeting in late spring 2025 and invite people to come and play the games and give us feedback. We also will make the mini-games available for use in small groups, such as Fire Safe Councils, so members of a neighborhood group can play the game together and think about strategies of risk reduction for their neighborhoods.

UC Berkeley News: Could this model be applied to other disasters that threaten the Bay Area, like sea level rise, flooding or earthquakes?

Louise Comfort: Absolutely. The task is the same for any hazard — wildfire, earthquakes, flash floods, landslides — even if the specific actions may differ by hazard. It means recognizing the risk in a specific context, then determining what resources are available to an individual, household, neighborhood, municipality or county to reduce that risk. It means understanding the risk in one’s specific neighborhood and determining what options are available to manage that risk. These are practical steps that greatly increase a community’s capacity for collective action under threat.

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Alameda County

New Data Show an Increase in Californians Enrolling as Undergraduates at UC Berkeley

UC and campus officials state that the increase in California undergraduates reinforces their dedication to expanding access to the state’s students and fulfilling the university’s compact with Gov. Newsom, and with the Legislature’s support, to grow in-state enrollment.

Published

2 months ago

January 11, 2025

Oakland Post

UC Berkeley Campus. Photo by Keegan Houser/UC Berkeley News.

The trend reflects an increase in Californian students enrolling across the UC system

By UC Berkeley News
Public Affairs Office

More Californians enrolled as new undergraduate students at UC Berkeley and other UC campuses in fall 2024 compared to the prior year, according to data released Tuesday by officials with the University of California systemwide office.

At the University of California, Berkeley, 7,657 new transfer and first-year students from California enrolled in fall 2024. Their percentage increased to 85% of all newly enrolled undergraduates, compared to about 80% in fall 2023.

Last spring, UC Berkeley officials admitted fewer first-year and transfer students to compensate for prior admissions cycles in which more students enrolled than anticipated. However, they increased the proportion of California residents offered first-year admission, increasing that number from 75% for fall 2023 to almost 80% for fall 2024. This occurred by offering fall 2024 admission to fewer first-year, out-of-state students, and international students.

Additional enrollment data for Berkeley and the nine other UC campuses are available on the UC website.