The Port Chicago 50

JOE SMALL AND THE OTHER forty-three were marched back to the pier. They spent another night on the prison barge.

The next morning, guards led six more sailors onto the barge—these six had initially agreed to return to work, but had wavered when it came time to load. All fifty prisoners were then taken by bus to Camp Shoemaker and locked in the brig. Only Small was placed in solitary confinement.

Four days later, a marine guard unlocked the door to Small’s cell and said, “The admiral wants to talk to you.”

Small was led to a private room. The guard shut the door, leaving Joe Small alone in the office with Admiral Carleton Wright.

“Small, you are the leader of this bunch,” Wright said. “If you return to work, the rest of the men will.”

Wright glared at him. “If you don’t return to work, I’m going to have you shot.”

That’s how Small later described it—in fact, he used a word a lot harsher than so-and-so. It couldn’t have helped his case.

As he was led back to prison, Small cooled off. He wished he hadn’t lost his temper. “That branded me as a mutineer,” he thought.

“What they expected me to do was to just go back to duty and forget everything. They assumed that if I went back to duty everybody would follow me. But I had what I considered a legitimate reason for not going back to work.”

Robert Routh, the Port Chicago sailor who’d been blinded in the blast, followed the story from his hospital bed.

“Go on brothers,” he said to himself when his doctor updated him on the refusal of the fifty prisoners. If not for the wounds in his eyes, Routh knew, it would be fifty-one.

“Small, how do you feel about going back to work?” one of the men asked him.

“Well, let ’em shoot. Because I’d sooner die by a bullet than an explosion.”

“I, for one, didn’t consider refusing to work mutiny,” he explained later. “We didn’t try to take over anything. We didn’t try to take command of the base. We didn’t try to replace any officers; we didn’t try to assume an officer’s position. How could they call it mutiny?”

From a legal standpoint, Small’s understanding of mutiny was pretty accurate. The Navy defined mutiny as “an unlawful opposition or resistance to or defiance of superior military authority, with a deliberate purpose to usurp, subvert, or override such authority.”

Had Small and the others really tried to seize authority from the officers? He clearly thought they had not.

In his official report on the case to Admiral Wright, Captain Nelson Goss said he was not surprised by the behavior of the men from Port Chicago. “There are undoubtedly agitators, ringleaders, among these men,” Goss wrote. “They have always been present since such personnel were first received at this depot.”

From the very beginning, the captain explained, he’d tried his best to work with the black sailors. “Particular care,” he wrote, “combined with patience, was exercised in outlining to these men the needs of the situation which required their services.”

But no matter how patient he was, claimed Goss, the sailors displayed “a consistent attitude towards discrimination; never justified, as far as I could ascertain.” He added: “The disposition, however, to seek opportunity to complain against fancied discrimination has always been present among present-day Negro enlisted personnel.”

Admiral Wright sent his own report to the new Secretary of the Navy, James Forrestal, who’d taken over the job in May. After outlining the facts, Wright added his personal theory of the cause of the trouble. “The refusal to perform the required work arises from a mass fear arising out of the Port Chicago explosion. This fear is unreasonably associated with the handling of ammunition in ships.”

That was it, just irrational fear. The way Wright saw it, neither the Navy’s racial policies nor the chaotic working conditions on the pier played any part in the men’s refusal to return to work.

“A considerable portion of the men involved are of a low order of mentality,” the admiral commented, echoing a prejudice held by many officers. Wright defended the use of black sailors to load ammunition—and yet he admitted that it looked very bad to have only black sailors doing the loading. At the end of his report, Wright asked permission to make a major change. He wanted to begin training white sailors to work some of the shifts at Port Chicago and Mare Island.

Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal

Secretary Forrestal approved the change and passed Wright’s report to President Roosevelt. Roosevelt sent a brief note back to Forrestal, suggesting light punishments for the 208 men who had eventually agreed to go back to work. “They were activated by mass fear,” commented Roosevelt. “This was understandable.”

As for what to do with the fifty sailors still refusing to work, Roosevelt left that to the Navy. But he forwarded the report to his wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, writing “for your information” on the top. This was significant, because he knew Eleanor met often with black leaders, and was an outspoken critic of racial discrimination.

He knew she’d keep an eye on the case of the alleged mutineers.

* * *

In accordance with the president’s suggestion, the Navy gave the men who had returned to work the relatively light punishment of losing three months’ pay.

The fifty young men in the Camp Shoemaker brig—half of them teenagers—were officially charged with mutiny. The fifty, Admiral Wright’s charge specified, had “conspired each with the other to mutiny against the lawful authority of their superior naval officers.”

The job of leading the prosecution went to Lieutenant Commander James Coakley. An experienced prosecutor, Coakley had served as assistant district attorney of Alameda County, California, before the war.

Coakley spent the next few weeks gathering evidence against the accused, with a special focus on Joe Small.

“Small was supposed to be the ringleader,” Edward Waldrop, one of the fifty, later explained. “What they wanted you to do, they wanted you to hang numbers on Small.”

A memo from James Forrestal addressed to the president outlines the events at Mare Island and recommends charges for those involved.

Coakley questioned many of the fifty personally. In his session with Waldrop, the lawyer demanded to know if Small had led the mutiny.

“No,” Waldrop responded.

“Well, somebody has got to be the leader,” Coakley insisted. “Everybody needs a leader.”

“Nobody made me do nothing. We don’t need a leader if you know what’s going on on that base.”

Jack Crittenden was questioned by James Tobin, the lieutenant of his division, with a marine guard looking on.

“Jack, I’m here to help you,” Tobin began. “You’re in trouble, and I’m here to help you.”

“Yeah, it looks like I’m in trouble—I got a big P on me,” Crittenden said, tapping the P for prisoner sewn to his shirt.

“Tell me what happened on the barge,” Tobin demanded.

“Lieutenant, I don’t know what went on on that barge. I was a scared jackrabbit on the barge.”

“Jack, you’re not being very cooperative.”

This became a common theme of the interrogations. The officers wanted details about the meeting on the barge, the one at which Small had spoken to the group. Coakley was convinced this gathering was a central part of Small’s secret plan, and he wanted to know exactly what had been said.

“I didn’t say the things he wanted to hear,” Crittenden remembered. “That made the marine guard so mad I thought he was going to beat me up when I came out of there.”

* * *

Guards later led Joe Small into the office of Lieutenant Louis Bannon, a legal officer at Camp Shoemaker. James Coakley was there too.

As Coakley listened, Bannon asked Small how it was that the men of Division Four had just happened to come to a stop in the road on the morning of August 9.

“How was it that the men refused to march,” asked Bannon, “or stopped marching when they were given the order ‘Column left’?”

“I guess they sensed something wrong,” Small said.

Bannon wasn’t satisfied. The refusal to march had to have been planned ahead of time, he said. “With whom had you talked about whether or not you would go down and load ships?”

“No one.”

“You had never talked to a soul about it?”

“No, sir.”

“Did anyone talk to you about it?”

“The boys did, yes, sir,” said Small. “Many of them.”

“Who were some of the boys who talked to you?” demanded Bannon.

“Practically everybody in the division.”

“Let’s get some names.”

“I couldn’t give their names unless I gave the names of the whole division. There wasn’t one that didn’t have something to say on that subject.”

“You were a leader selected by the men,” Bannon said. “They had faith in you, and the officers accepted you as a leader of the men.”

Small didn’t deny it. And he freely admitted that before August 9, many of the men had talked in the barracks about what they would do when they were ordered back to work loading ammunition. But he insisted there had been no organized plan to stop in the road, and that he had never tried to convince anyone to refuse to load.

Bannon turned to the barge meeting of August 10. He wanted to see if Small would admit to having called the men together for a talk.

Small did, explaining his goal had been to try to prevent a deadly eruption of violence between prisoners and guards.

“Did anybody else talk at that meeting besides you?” Bannon asked.

“No one else spoke at the meeting except myself, no, sir.”

* * *

Back in his cell, thinking over the questions he’d been asked, Small realized what a deep hole he was in. Clearly, the officers saw him as the leader of a carefully crafted rebellion. They believed Small, in midnight barracks meetings, had convinced the men of his division to join him in mutiny.

It simply hadn’t been like that, Small knew.

“It wasn’t discussed,” he later explained. “The Navy in their action, in their handling of our lives, had brought us down to the point where this was the necessary course of action. And there was nothing to discuss.”

But Coakley had his theory, and was determined to prove it in court.

One by one, he called in the men who had agreed to go back to work after Admiral Wright’s speech. He knew these men were hoping for light punishments, and he expected they’d be more willing to talk than the accused mutineers. Some were.

Several confirmed that there had been talk in the barracks in the nights before August 9; discussions about whether to go back to handling ammunition. Others told Coakley about the barge meeting. At Coakley’s urging, the men tried to recall the words Small had used on the barge. As is always the case with eyewitnesses, different people remembered the same scene differently. But a few told Coakley that Small had said something about sticking together and having the officers “by the balls.” No, it was “by the ass,” someone else reported. Another remembered “by the tail.”

Whatever the exact phrase, Coakley was now absolutely convinced that Small had not spoken to the men to prevent violence, as he claimed. Small’s true goal, Coakley believed, had been to keep the group unified—to stop anyone who was wavering from giving in and going back to work.

Coakley was sure the fifty men were guilty of premeditated mutiny. He was sure that Joe Small had planned and orchestrated the whole thing.

* * *

The court-martial of the Port Chicago fifty was set to open on September 14.

The Navy hastily assigned Lieutenant Gerald Veltmann, a thirty-four-year-old lawyer from Texas, to lead the defense. Veltmann was given four young lawyers to assist him. The process was so rushed, the lawyers didn’t even have time to meet with each of the accused before the trial began.

“I figured we’d go to trial, and then get shot,” recalled Martin Bordenave.

But Veltmann was hopeful. As he raced to prepare, the defense lawyer spotted what he thought were a few weaknesses in the case against the accused mutineers.

When asked later to describe his mood in the days leading up to the court-martial, Veltmann replied, “Oh I would say it was calm. I don’t think anyone had their heads hanging down, or their tails between their legs. I wasn’t, at that time, old enough to be afraid of anybody.”