[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 114 (Wednesday, July 10, 2024)]
[House]
[Page H4537]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        HONORING PORT CHICAGO 50

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
California (Mr. DeSaulnier) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DeSAULNIER. Mr. Speaker, I am here today to recognize the 
upcoming 80th anniversary of the Port Chicago explosion and to honor 
and seek justice for the Port Chicago 50, an incident that led 
President Harry Truman at the time to desegregate the United States 
Navy.
  On Monday, July 17, 1944, at 10:18 p.m., disaster struck. Crewmembers 
were working in shifts around the clock to load munitions onto newly 
built ships so they could be sent off to fight in the Pacific in World 
War II. This explosion ripped through the shipyard at the Port Chicago 
Naval Magazine, about 18 miles northeast of San Francisco.
  The explosion killed or wounded 710 people, 435 of whom were African-
American sailors. This was the deadliest homefront disaster of World 
War II. This explosion was felt in downtown San Francisco as windows 
shook, and people thought there was an earthquake.
  In another blow to the survivors, 50 of the brave enlisted men, all 
of whom were African American, refused to return to the unsafe working 
conditions that led to the explosion. They were discriminately 
convicted of mutiny.

  Those men are now known as the Port Chicago 50. They were heroes, not 
traitors, who deserve to be fully exonerated 80 years later.
  Indicative of the discriminatory practices and segregation policies 
at the time, all the enlisted men loading ammunition at the site were 
African Americans while all the officers were White. None of the 
African-American ammunition loaders were formally trained in the safe 
handling of munitions, as opposed to the Teamsters on the West Coast, 
who were White and properly trained.
  After the explosion, the survivors were in a state of shock, troubled 
by the vivid memory of the horrible explosion in which so many of their 
friends had died. The day after the explosion, about 200 of the Black 
enlisted men helped with the cleanup operation.
  One survivor recalled: ``I was there the next morning. We went back 
to the dock. Man, it was awful. That was a sight. You would see a shoe 
with a foot in it. . . . You would see a head floating across the 
water, just the head, or an arm, bodies. Just awful.''
  ``Everybody was scared,'' another survivor recalled. ``If someone 
dropped a box or slammed a door, people began jumping around like 
crazy.''
  Many of the Black survivors expected to be granted survivors' leave 
before being reassigned to regular duty. Those leaves were never 
granted for the African-American sailors, not even for the men who had 
been hospitalized.
  All the African-American sailors were sent back to work, loading 
ammunition under the same officers as before, but White officers were 
allowed to go home for 30-day leaves.
  As the men marched to go back to work 3 weeks after the incident at 
another dock, they knew that, at a certain junction in the road, if 
they were ordered to turn right, they were going to the parade ground, 
but if they were ordered to turn left, they were going to continue to 
load ammunitions, just like they were 3 weeks earlier.

                              {time}  1100

  At the moment the sailors were ordered to go left, and they all 
stopped, one of the officers asked the sailor, Joseph Small, the lead 
African American, why they stopped. He responded to the White officer: 
We are scared, sir.
  Mr. Speaker, 328 of the sailors followed him and refused to return to 
work, 258 were imprisoned as a result, and 50 were later charged with 
conspiring to make mutiny. This was not mutiny. There was no active 
rebellion, revolt, or coordinated effort to overthrow a command as 
required by law. It was men who, after having to witness and even clean 
up the bloody aftermath of this explosion, feared for their lives and 
were being forced to return to the same unfair conditions and to worry 
every day whether they would be next.
  Thurgood Marshall, who ultimately became involved in their trial on 
Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay for the Port Chicago 50, once 
said: ``What's at stake here is more than the rights of my clients; 
it's the moral commitment stated in our Nation's creed.''
  This quote rings even more true today, 80 years later. By not taking 
action to exonerate these brave men, we are reaffirming the 
discriminatory action taken against them 80 years ago. By refusing to 
stand up for their innocence, we are sanctioning the discrimination 
they faced 80 years ago. It is long past time that we right this 
historical injustice and officially clear the record.

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