The Port Chicago mutiny: after a deadly blast, 50 black sailors refused to return to work--and went to jail instead. (times past).

You didn't say no. It was the wartime Navy, and you didn't defy the lieutenant--especially if you were black and he was white.

But Joe Small said no anyway. After an explosion killed 320 people in Port Chicago, California, he and 49 other black sailors refused to return to the dangerous work of loading ammunition onto ships. The Navy jailed them for mutiny. But their refusal helped propel the U.S. armed services toward racial justice.

When the U.S. entered World War IT in 1941, the armed forces were still segregated. African-Americans had to serve in all-black units led by white officers. Blacks had little hope of promotion and were usually given the dirtiest, most thankless jobs.

At Port Chicago, a U.S. Navy ammunition facility just 30 miles northeast of San Francisco, black sailors were given the job of loading explosives onto cargo ships bound for the battle front. Many of them complained about the danger, but they were ignored. So were the Coast Guard and professional dock workers when they pointed out that no one at Port Chicago had been trained to handle explosives.

At 10:19 p.m. on July 17, 1944, two ships were tied up at the Port Chicago dock. One was full of ammunition, the other set to be loaded. Suddenly there were two huge explosions. Sailor Floyd Scott told The New York Times that the first blast shook the building he was in

like a terrier shakes a rat. I managed to get to my feet and started out the door when there was a second explosion and I saw the barracks go down and [heard] the sound of men screaming.

Sailors thought the Japanese had attacked. But it soon appeared that the blasts had been either an accident or sabotage. No one knows which, because the 320 men closest to the blast were killed, 202 of them black sailors. Another 390 were hurt. It was the war's worst home-front disaster.

On August 9, the surviving sailors were ordered into place to resume the loading. Sailor Joe Small recalled:

When the lieutenant gave the command, "Column left," everybody stopped dead, boom, just like that. He said, "Forward, march-column left!" Nobody moved. Later an officer ... said, "Small, are you going back to work?" And I told him, "No, sir." He asked why. I said I was afraid. Then somebody over in the ranks said, "if Small don't go, we're not going either."

In all, 258 men told officers they would follow any order except one, to load ammunition. After they were threatened with a firing squad, 208 of them returned to work, but 50 still said no. The 50 were court-martialed and sentenced to 15 years' hard labor.

Thurgood Marshall, who would later become the first black Supreme Court Justice, was there and wrote:

This is net fifty men on trial for mutiny. This is the Navy on trial for its whole vicious policy toward Negroes. Negroes are not afraid of anything any more than anyone else. Negroes in the Navy don't mind loading ammunition. They just want to know why they are the only ones doing the loading!

Within weeks, the Navy began assigning whites, too, to the dangerous work. And the mutinous sailors were released after 17 months rather than 15 years. But the convictions remained on their records.

In 1994, a Navy review of the case upheld the guilty verdicts, saying that sailors cannot choose which orders to follow. President Clinton is now reviewing a petition to pardon the mutineers, only a few of whom survive. Historians say that by dramatizing the second-class status assigned to blacks, the incident helped bring the integration of the Navy in 1948.

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