MILITARY JUSTICE AT THE MILLENNIUM

Jere W. Roberson (ed.)

The following two articles are sadly indicative of the 55-year old struggle for justice for African-American military personnel who suffered blatant injustice during America's "Great Crusade" against Nazism and Fascism during World War II. Except for the Mexican War (a war in which black Americans had no official presence) there never was an American war during which racial injustices against black military personnel were not committed. And in the aftermath of each war veterans and their families sought to make the record right and remove the mark against their families. It seems especially cruel that as we enter the new millennium that the struggle has to go on, and that we even have to make a point of not only pointing out to our fellow Americans that black men and women were in the military ranks during World War II and made major contributions to the liberation of Europe and Asia, but that we have to fight against stereotyping of black military personnel.

President Bill Clinton began early in his career to shock and amaze Americans with his attempt to bring fairness to the military. His attempts to eliminate discrimination against gays in the military shock Americans. His support for women in the ranks and in the officer corps and the open controversy about women in the military academies has loosened the hold that men have had on the bastions. Following in the footsteps of General Colin Powell, the first black American ever to reach the top of the ranks as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1989-1993), President Clinton also began setting the record straight about the role of black soldiers, airmen and sailors during World War II. In emotional ceremonies he awarded Medals of Honor to black soldiers, somewhat belatedly making up for the racism of the past.

The two articles that follow are two of the most recent episodes in the saga. It is certain that America will enter its first millennium still carrying the weight of past racial injustices in the military. But at least the window is open and we can look in. The greatness of a people comes not in what it protects and hides, but in what it feels strong enough to make vulnerable (its justice system in these cases) and what it opens for view.

Even in the one war that was officially closed to black Americans (the war with Mexico) black Americans suffered injustices as scouts, guides, or laborers.

A SOLDIER'S STORY

By Joseph L. Galloway

Long after Eddie Carter died, the U.S. Army and a grateful nation awarded him America's highest honor for heroism in combat. That was two years ago [1997], and it seemed at the time that an old wrong had finally been righted. It had, but not entirely. Because there was still a mystery about how his country had treated Staff Sgt. Edward A. Carter Jr. About how a battlefield hero could be broken by the country he served, then banished from his beloved military career like a bum. About why.

Now, at last, the mystery is ended, the puzzle complete. And if the picture it reveals is not entirely new, it reminds again how a nation consumed by paranoia and misspent passion can consume in turn even those who have loved and served it best. Until just days ago [May 29, 1999], this much was known about Sergeant Carter's case: Despite his certified record of heroism killing Nazis on the battlefields of Germany, the Army--on the basis of secret charges of disloyalty that had no basis in fact--denied Carter the right to continue serving his country in uniform. There was no hearing. No explanation. No appeal. Just a cold stone wall. It happened in a very different America, in an America just entering the deep freeze of the cold war, a country where patriots and political hacks pursued homegrown Communists, real and imagined, with the passion of avenging angels.

It was not a good time and place to be Eddie Carter. Besides his race, Carter had lived an outsized life. He had been raised in strange lands, fought in foreign armies. China? The Spanish Civil War?

Such entries on his résumé raised questions among the Commie hunters. But at such a time and place, such questions-with no answers, no evidence of wrongdoing, and despite his distinguished Army service- had the power to wound and wound fatally. Banned from the service, Eddie Carter fought on for years, asking only that he be allowed to pursue his love of soldiering. But the soldier's country said no. Eddie Carter was crushed, his heart broken. In 1963, he died in Los Angeles. He was 47 years old.

Clearly, a terrible wrong had been done. But Eddie Carter was not alone in that. Two years ago, when President Clinton presented the Medal of Honor to Carter's family, he bestowed the same belated honor on six other African-American soldiers whose service in World War II distinguished them as heroes.

But Carter's story was different. Unlike the families of the other veterans who received the medal from the president, Eddie Carter's two sons and a daughter-in-law he never knew were angry. There were fine words of encomium throughout the White House ceremony. But the words Eddie Carter's kin needed to hear most were never uttered: We apologize. Edward Carter III, the eldest, recalls the memory vividly. "Honor without honor,' he says, summing up the moment.

THE SEARCH

Which is why the story didn't stop there. Eddie Carter's family wanted to know the truth. They wanted to know it even if it burned like lye. And they wanted America to know it, too. Edward III's wife, Allene, knew the old soldier only from his cards, letters, and family photos. But in her drive to remove the stain from her father-in-law's name she allowed herself no rest. There were blizzards of demands for records. For hidden files. Using the Freedom of Information Act, she peppered the Army and the FBI for answers. It was a lonely crusade. Friends and government officials urged the family to leave the secrets of the past buried in the past. Allene Carter would hear none of it. Eddie Carter's life was destroyed by secrets and lies. Only in their exposure could healing begin.

But exposure, as any detective can tell you, takes time. Slowly, painstakingly, paying her own way and working in state and national archives on her vacations from her job as a nighttime 911 supervisor in Los Angeles, Allene Carter assembled the pieces one by one. From a trunk she found in a storage locker she unearthed Eddie Carter's letters. Seeking answers, he had written to the Army, the Department of Defense, the White House. He pleaded with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the American Civil Liberties Union to champion his cause. From the letters emerges a pie-hire of pain and bewilderment. What dark force had caused his banishment?

The answers were slow in coming. Then, just last month, Allene Carter finally got what she'd been waiting for: 57 pages of documents that constituted the newly declassified counterintelligence file the Army had assembled on Eddie Carter. The contents were breathtaking. The Army opened its file on Carter in 1942, when he first enlisted. It was updated like clockwork right up until he was denied re-enlistment in the fall of 1949. Carter, it seems, was watched like a cat. His commanders in every unit he served in filed secret reports on him. No detail was unworthy of mention. The magazines he read are noted with care: Popular Science and Popular Mechanics. So, too, the club he joined: the Masons. There are interviews with neighbors and landlords. With bosses on every job he ever had. Even Carter's father was interrogated.

THE FILE

A summary of the Carter case dated June 4, 1943, listed the following "adverse information" about Sergeant Carter: 1. "Subject reportedly was a member of Abraham Lincoln Brigade, having served for 2 1/4 years with said Brigade in Spain? " True enough, as far as the notation went. A born soldier, Carter had joined the brigade and fought with distinction with it in the Spanish Civil War. 2. "Potentially adverse-Subject is seemingly potentially capable of having connections with subversive activities due to the fact that he spent his early years (until 1938) in the Orient and has a speaking knowledge of Hindustani and Mandarin Chinese." More true facts--albeit ones unilluminated by any context. Carter's parents were missionaries, and he was raised by them as a young man in China. Twice, the record reflects, well-meaning men tried to abort the witch hunt. "In view of absence of any adverse information as result of completed investigation," an entry dated 1943 states, "it is recommended that case be closed and authority be granted Unit Commander to mark Subject's service record: 'Not considered potentially subversive'. Recommend case be closed." The recommendation went nowhere. At the end of the Carter file is a single sheet of paper, on Army letterhead, from the Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff, G-2, Intelligence. The letter refers to Sergeant Carter and states: "ALLEGATION: Communist Party suspect. SOURCE: 6th Army." Then this: "Information on the allegation is not reflected in the files of the Assistant Chief of Staff, G-2, Department of the Army." Despite all the Army's compulsive snooping and file making, in other words, there wasn't a single damning fact about Carter. Only that letter's allegation. It was dated Dec. 4, 1950. Carter had been refused re-enlistment more than a year earlier.

There is irony in that. Carter's fight for justice began in September 1949, after he was told he would not be permitted to re-enlist. Had he seen that piece of paper, he would have known the charge against him. Herbert M. Levy, then a young lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union who took on Carter's case, explains why: "The pronounced national hysteria about communism,"he says, doomed Carter's cause. To truly understand, he suggests, a passing knowledge of Kafka is useful. "This was completely indecent," Levy, now 76, says. "But we were on the path to hysteria. It was guilt by association. It was un-American, but it was being done by the House Un-American Activities Committee."

THE BEGINNING

To best understand Eddie Carter's story, it helps to start at the beginning. Carter was born in Los Angeles on May 26, 1916, on a brief visit home by his parents, the Rev. E. A. Carter, a traveling missionary, and Mary Carter, a native of Calcutta. The Carters took their young son back to Calcutta, where he attended grade school. The elder Carter then resettled the family in Shanghai, where young Eddie attended a military school. After his fatherdivorced his mother and married a German national, Eddie ran away from home and joined the Chinese Nationalist Army fighting the Japanese. The father got the son back by revealing the young man's age: He wasn't yet 18.

But Carter wasn't home for long. After hitching a ride on a merchant ship to Manila, he tried to enlist in the U.S. Army but was rebuffed. So he worked his way to Europe on another merchant ship and joined the Spanish Loyalists in their fight against Gen. Francisco Franco's fascists. Carter's name appears on the roster of the American volunteer unit that fought in Spain, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Carter spent 21/2 years in Spain, often in fierce combat. Once he was captured and held by Franco's forces. Somehow he escaped. At the end, in early 1938, Carter was among the Loyalists in the mountains when the line broke and those who could fled across the border to France.

Carter, by all accounts, didn't take up the Loyalist cause out of any particular political bent. He threw in with them for the same reason he joined the Chinese Army: He loved a good fight.

SIGNING UP

After Spain, Carter caught a boat to America. In 1940, he met and began courting Mildred Hoover, the widowed daughter of a well-known black family that kept a boarding house in Los Angeles. On Sept. 26, 1941, Carter enlisted in the Army and was shipped to Camp Wolters, Texas, where he baffled instructors who couldn't understand how a raw recruit shot near-perfect scores with five different weapons. From Texas, Carter was shipped to Fort Benning, Ga. Less than a year later he was promoted to staff sergeant.

Combat billets for black soldiers were scarce. Army leadership subscribed to a policy that black troops couldn't be relied on in combat and were best used as service troops in engineering, transportation, or stevedore outfits. So, despite his previous combat service, Carter was assigned as a mess sergeant in the 3535 Quartermaster Truck Company. In 1942, Mildred joined him in Georgia where they were married. In two years, she gave him two sons, Edward III and William, in addition to the two children she had by a previous marriage.

The domestic bliss didn't last long. On Nov. 13, 1944, Carter and his truck company arrived in Europe and were assigned to transporting supplies to the fighting forces. For three months straight, Carter began every day by volunteering for combat. No luck. By late February of 1945, however, things had changed. The Battle of the Bulge had cut through the Army's infantry ranks like a scythe. Reinforcements were needed desperately Army brass appealed for volunteers among black troops.

Carter was among the first chosen. Like the other 2,600 black volunteers, he was forced to give up his rank and become a private. Carter stripped off his sergeant stripes and awaited assignment. It didn't take long. The 7th Army sent Lt. Russell Blair to collect a platoon of black volunteers. Carter caught his eye immediately. "Eddie Carter was an outstanding soldier," Blair remembers. "He was always neat and soldierly. There was no malarkey about him. He soldiered 24 hours a day. He was one of the best ones. You bet."

Things moved fast. Carter's unit was organized into the 1st Provisional Company, assigned to the 12th Armored Division, then assigned again to the 56th Armored Infantry Battalion. "They gave us some six-by-six trucks, three jeeps, a command halftrack and a maintenance halftrack," Blair says. "Mid that's what we fought our war out of." Floyd Vanderhoff, the company commander, and Blair, the executive officer, made two decisions right off the bat. They gave Carter his staff sergeant stripes back. Then they made him a squad leader of Infantry.
TO FIGHT

The fighting was at hand. The 12th Armored Division was detached to Gen. George Patton's 3^rd Army, and Old Blood and Guts was salivating at the prospect of beating Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery across the Rhine and punching a hole through the heart of Nazi Germany.

Carter was ready. It was the 23rd day of March 1945, and the 12th Armored was on a dash toward the city of Speyer. There was a bridge over the Rhine there, still intact. The 714th Tank Battalion was rolling at the point, Eddie Carter and the other black volunteers clinging to the backs of the 714th's rumbling Shermans. Suddenly, German antitank rockets were streaming through the air. Machine-gun fire crackled.

Carter and his squad took cover. Ahead was a big warehouse. That's where the rocket fire was coming from. From the road embankment he'd dived behind, Carter surveyed the scene: the warehouse and open ground, maybe 150 yards, between it and him. The warehouse had to be taken. Carter volunteered. He would lead a three-man patrol. Clambering over the embankment, Carter saw one of his men cut down instantly. He ordered the other two to turn back. Before they could rend] the embankment one was killed, the other wounded. Carter ran on alone. Before he reached the berm surrounding the warehouse, he'd taken five bullets and three pieces of shrapnel. He crawled the last few yards, blood and dirt staining his fatigues.

For two hours, Carter waited. Finally, convinced he was dead, an eight-man patrol came out to make sure. Waiting for his moment, Carter opened up with his .45-caliber Thompson submachine gun. Within seconds, six Germans were dead. Carter took the other two prisoner. Using the two as human shields, he marched back across the open field to his company.

Russel Blair couldn't believe his eyes. From an observation post he'd established on the second floor of a brewery, he watched Carter and the two Nazis cross the road. Blair wanted Carter evacuated to a medic's tent so his wounds could be treated. Carter refused. Instead, he climbed the stairs to the observation post and pointed out several German machine-gun nests. Then he turned his prisoners over for interrogation. Utilizing Carter's information, Blair's company cleared the road to Speyer. The city was taken in two days.

Less than a month later, Carter reported back to Blair, ready for duty. A few days after that Blair got a telegram from the Army hospital in the rear, reporting that Carter was missing, apparently gone AWOL from the hospital. "We sent word to them that it was OK," Blair says. "We told them Eddie was back with us and everything was all right?'

With Carter, too. In a letter home, he wrote: "Well, I am on my way back up to the front. I'll be darn glad to get back; back into the fight... Mil, I am in good health except for these bullet holes paining me at times. Maybe I shouldn't have talked my way out of the hospital so soon. The hospital was OK except for the four walls that just about drove me crazy."

Carter soldiered on to the end of the war in Germany. In July of 1945, Captain Blair, now commanding Provisional Company 1, signed a recommendation that Carter be awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the nation's second-highest decoration for valor in combat. The DSC was approved, one of only nine awarded to black soldiers for heroism during the war.

BACK HOME

In 1946, Carter was back in Los Angeles. He and Mildred were sought-after guests not only in black society but white society, too. One of the many invitations they accepted was to a "Welcome Home, Joe" dinner. The headliners were Frank Sinatra and Ingrid Bergman. The chairman for the event was Harpo Marx. The dinner was organized by the American Youth for Democracy, a left-wing political group. One of the sponsors was screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who would later be blacklisted in the movie industry for refusing to answer questions of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Trouble, already, was in the air.

Carter, meanwhile, made a stab at business, leasing out a wartime landing craft for movie-promotion stunts and fishing trips. But the business went bust and the war-hero scene was fading. Carter decided it was time to get back in uniform. The Army snapped him up for a three-year tour at his old rank. Not long after that, he was promoted to sergeant first class.

Things, it seemed, were looking up. The brass chose Carter and two other senior noncommissioned officers to train and organize a new all-black National Guard engineer unit in Southern California. Carter was back in his element. Almost from the moment he re-enlisted, however, the old questions were raised again. Army counterintelligence investigators came to interview Carter. A series of weekly Army intelligence summaries from 1945 to 1946 show how concerned intelligence agencies were with black communities. One document dated Jan. 5, 1946, looked at the "racial situation" and said, "Tension continues; no major incidents." It ranked two "sensitive areas" on the West Coast. One was Los Angeles: "Rated as sensitive because of the heavy concentration of Negro workers, unrest in the Los Angeles Harbor area, and current government contract cutbacks."

Then there was that dinner. An Army intelligence summary dated Jan. 12, 1946, noted that an informer was present and stated: "Quotation of embittered World War II veterans honored at the recent Welcome Home Joe dinner sponsored by the American Youth for Democracy (CP organization) as denouncing the 'so-called democracy for which they fought' and saying that they have returned 'to find America more prejudiced than before, and intolerance at an all-time new high'."

Re-enlistment refused. Carter paid no heed. He was proud of his role in training the new all-black engineer company. Near the end of his three-year tour, he was transferred from Los Angeles to Fort Lewis, Wash. His family moved north with him. There was no sign of anything wrong until Sept. 21, 1949, when Carter's enlistment ended. When he announced his intention to reenlist for another tour, Carter's commanders said no. He would not be allowed to re-enlist, they said, without the specific permission of the adjutant general of the Army. Carter was stunned. He paid his own way to Washington and turned up on the steps of the adjutant general's office to ask why he couldn't re-enlist. He got nowhere.

Now he was angry. He turned to the NAACP. It bombarded the Army with letters and telegrams. But it got nowhere, either. NAACP lawyers could find no evidence that Carter was being discriminated against because of his race. Carter took his case to the ACLU and staff lawyer Herbert Levy.

In a letter dictated by Carter to his wife, Mildred, Carter told Levy, "I have always been loyal and faithful to the land of my birth. Sir, if I were guilty of being a traitor to my country, would I have traveled at my own expense to the Department of the Army requesting permission to re-enlist? I need help. I ask for justice. This could not be democracy. There must be some mistake."

By May of 1950, Carter's spirits were low. In another letter to Levy, Carter said he was enclosing his DSC medal and asked that the next time Levy visited the White House he give it back to President Truman. "In my country's hour of need, I was in the front lines with a submachine gun in my fist. My reward? A stab in the back. So far I have lost two jobs after word passed around that I had been kicked out of the Army because I was a Communist."

Levy tried everything. On May i6, 1950, he wrote Defense Secretary Lewis Johnson: "All that Mr. Carter asks is that he be given a statement of the charges against him and a full hearing on these charges. We join in his request. ... We feel sure that you will agree with us that a man who has served his country so well is at least entitled to a hearing." This letter, like all others, bounced back to the adjutant general of the Army, Maj. Gen. Edward F. Witsell. He answered Levy's letter.

"A complete and comprehensive review of Mr. Carter's records has been made by competent Department of the Army agencies," Witsell wrote, "and it has been determined that his re-enlistment cannot be authorized."

In a private letter to another ACLU attorney, Levy wrote, on Nov. 29, 1950, that an officer in the adjutant general's office told him that the Army had "turned down Carter purely on the basis of a directive to do so from the Central Intelligence Agency which itself did not disclose the reasons to the adjutant general." No evidence of any CIA directive in the Carter case has surfaced in the papers released to the Carter family.

Herbert Levy was 26 years old when he took on the Carter case. "We never found the reason he was suspect," Levy says now, 50 years later. "The only two things there were his involvement with the Spanish Loyalists and the Youth for Democracy dinner. If you were associated with a group like that, you were suspected of being a sympathizer, or a 'Pink.' Apparently this thing just took on a life of its own."

In Tacoma, Wash., Carter got work as a vulcanizer in a tire plant. He and Mildred started breeding registered dogs to keep food on the table and the rent paid. In the summer of 1954, in answer to one of Carter's letters, Levy said, "Frankly in view of the obvious scare thrown into the Army by the McCarthy mess, I am even less hopeful than I was in my last letter to you of April 7, 1953, in which I expressed pessimism but would not concede defeat." In response to Carter's request, the ACLU lawyer returned the DSC medal, which he had not given Harry Truman, plus copies of all Carter's records and papers.

In 1955, Mildred and the children moved back to Los Angeles. Carter followed a few months later. He got work as a vulcanizer at another tire factory, in the Los Angeles area. It was hot, dirty work, just one more blow on top of the one he had already suffered in having to move back into his wife's home. Carter began drinking. By 1958 a family friend, a physician, wrote to Herbert Levy's successor at the ACLU asking if perhaps the climate in America had changed enough so that Eddie Carter might be allowed to re-enlist. The doctor noted that it would help Eddie and his family too. The ACLU replied that it saw no reason to believe that the Army would now be willing to change its mind.

Late in 1962, Carter was diagnosed with lung cancer. He died on Jan. 30, 1963, and was buried in the National Cemetery in Los Angeles. That might have been the end, except for a study undertaken by the US. Army in 1995-1996 to determine why no black soldiers in World War II had received a Medal of Honor, The study focused on the nine black soldiers, including Edward Allen Carter Jr., who had earned the DSC. A special Army Awards Board panel determined that seven of those DSC recipients, Carter included, should have their awards upgraded to the highest combat award, the Medal of Honor.

Seeking answers. All of this was enough for Allene Carter to swing into action. "There were silences in this family that I didn't understand, and Eddie Carter and what happened to him was always at the heart of the silence," Allene Carter says. "When Mildred moved in with us, and all she could talk about was Eddie, and I found the trunk in storage, it seemed like the right time to begin to find some answers to all the questions." Most of the answers are spread on the record, thanks to Allene Carter's bulldog tenacity ("I come from the South Side of Chicago; this is not some soft California person you are dealing with.").

What happened to Eddie Carter Jr. should never have happened in a democratic nation. What happened to him wouldn't have happened a few years earlier or even a few years later. If the U.S. Army and the United States government would like to say "We're sorry; we apologize for what happened to Eddie Carter," the Carter family says it is ready to listen and ready to forgive. And maybe a long-dead hero who now sleeps in Arlington National Cemetery will rest a bit easier.



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EXPLOSION AT PORT CHICAGO

by Earl Ofari Hutchinson

Freddie Meeks was not pleased when he heard President Clinton tell an interviewer in June 1997 that he would consider apologizing for slavery. It was a painful reminder that despite the pleas of numerous congressional leaders, Clinton had offered no apologies to Meeks or forty-nine other black Navy men convicted of mutiny during World II. They and their supporters believe that their convictions are the greatest travesty of justice in U.S. military history.

On July 1, 1944, the naval depot at Port Chicago, about forty-five miles southwest of Sacramento, was leveled by a huge explosion aboard two adjacent munitions vessels. According to some reports, the blast had one-third the force of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It killed more than three hundred seamen, almost two-thirds of them black, and caused damage in towns thirty-five miles away. The African-Americans stationed at Port Chicago had been assigned the dangerous task of loading bombs and artillery shells onto the holds of ships bound for the Pacific, yet they had not been trained to handle ammunition. Two hundred and two of them died in the accident, more than 15 percent of all the African-American casualties in World War II.

Less than a month later the surviving black sailors were told to resume work, still with no attempt by the Navy to train the men. This time the sailors refused and were arrested. The subsequent trial of fifty alleged ringleaders of this mutiny aroused the anger of African-Americans nationwide; this was yet another reminder of racism in the U.S. military.

All the branches of the armed forces were segregated, but Meeks and the forty-nine other black defendants had the ill fortune to be assigned to the branch of the service where racism was most deeply entrenched. Even though, in 1942, after intense pressure from the Roosevelt administration and civil rights groups, the Navy had opened its general services to blacks, the majority were still denied positions as clerks, radio operators, and gunners. They served instead as mess attendants, stewards' mates, and common laborers-cooking, cleaning, shining shoes, doing the laundry, and in the case of the Port Chicago sailors, loading ammunition.

At Port Chicago black sailors were housed in segregated barracks and base facilities. They were served their meals only after white sailors had finished eating. When they had shore leave, the military gave them (unlike whites) no transportation to and from Oakland or San Francisco, and the citizens of the town near the base were less than welcoming. They claimed they were frequently denied ratings and promotion. Moreover, they were the only sailors responsible for loading ammunition onto the ships, and they were frequently subject to impossible speedups-mostly imposed by contests among white officers to see which division could load the most ammunition during each shift. The Navy punished even the mildest complaints from black servicemen with threats of jailing, courts-martial, and dishonorable discharges.

"We were treated like a slave outfit," recalls one black recruit. Freddie Meeks, who was a twenty-year-old seaman in 1944, remembers that he and the other loaders received no training in safety regulations, equipment operations, or ammunition-loading procedures. The white officers had no real training themselves, and the officer in charge at Port Chicago failed to post safety procedures in the barracks because he did not think the sailors could understand them. Because of this live shells were frequently dropped. The situation was so dangerous that the longshoremen's union refused to allow any of its members to work at Port Chicago, and reportedly issued a warning: If the Navy continued to operate with untrained personnel, the entire operation would meet with disaster.

Around 10:00 P.M. on July 17, the two vessels loading ammunition at Port Chicago, the F. A. Bryan and the Quinalt Victory, exploded. The blast instantly killed everyone aboard the two ships and on the pier, destroyed the vessels, and wounded nearly four hundred people. The Port Chicago disaster, as it quickly became known, was the deadliest military accident of the home front and one of the worst in U.S. history.

Although Meeks had escaped injury--he was away that night on leave--the incident would trigger a chain of events that would haunt him for the rest of his life. During that night and the next morning, he and 257 other black loaders returned to the docks for cleanup duty. "It was a mess," Meeks recalls." They made the blacks stand watch for hours in a warehouse over open baskets in which badly mutilated bodies had been shoved."

"You can imagine what it did to young men of twenty-one or twenty-two," recalls Robert Routh, Jr., nineteen at the time and permanently blinded by shattered glass from the blast, "when, on the night of the explosion, they found the decapitated bodies of fellow sailors." Only 51 out of the 320 dead were ever positively identified.

Although a Navy review panel promptly began an inquiry into the explosion and heard testimony from 125 witnesses (only five of them black seamen), the investigators were unable to find an exact cause. In its report the panel ultimately cited mishandling of equipment and improper loading procedures, but it also absolved the white officers of any responsibility. The panel's conclusion strongly implied that the blast was caused solely by the bungling of black seamen. The judge advocate stated that "the colored enlisted personnel are neither temperamentally or intellectually capable of handling high explosives."

Nevertheless, even before the panel had completed its investigation, Navy officials decided to send the "incapable" ammunition loaders back to work, despite the fact that the white sailors who helped in the cleanup had been given thirty-day leaves. When Meeks and the other blacks were told to resume loading the ships with ammunition, they balked. (It has never been clear as to whether the sailors were initially asked or ordered to return to work.) "Many of the men were in a state of shock, troubled by the vivid memory of the horrible explosion in which so many of their friends had died," writes Robert L. Allen in his hook, The Port Chicago Mutiny.

Now afraid to handle ammunition, 258 sailors refused their orders and were promptly imprisoned on a barge in San Pablo Bay. Naval officers threatened them with long prison sentences if they didn't go back to work. They continued to hold firm. Finally the commanding admiral gathered the men and told them they would he charged with mutiny and most likely put before a firing squad, since mutiny in time of war carried the death sentence. They were stunned.

Most of them were very young, from the South, and familiar with racial violence and lynchings. The majority gave in and were taken to Camp Shoemaker for interrogation and summary courts-martial before returning to the loading docks.

But the fifty sailors who held out were charged with mutiny and imprisoned. "It was ridiculous," Meeks bitterly remembers. "We weren't disloyal. We didn't assault any officers. We didn't try to take over the base. We were scared that we would die if we went back to work." President Franklin Roosevelt apparently agreed-but only when it came to the 208 men who were willing to return to work. In a private memo to the Navy secretary he wrote that these men were "activated by mass fear and ... this was understandable."

An all-white military tribunal did not sympathize, especially with the fifty men on trial. After thirty-two days of hearings, the Navy court took eighty minutes to convict Meeks and the other men of mutiny. The panel went on to drop the death penalty, almost certainly because of pressure from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the black press, but it sentenced the men to fifteen years and stripped them of their benefits. Thurgood Marshall, who was working as a lawyer for the NAACP, immediately began to prepare an appeal for the convicted men. He questioned why when more than one black man disobeyed an order it was called a mutiny, and he criticized the Navy and its "whole vicious policy toward Negroes," calling for a more thorough investigation of Navy practices.

The men were freed in 1946 as part of a general amnesty for imprisoned servicemen and war resisters. Initially they received dishonorable discharges. All but five of the fifty convicted sailors eventually finished their enlistments and received general discharges under honorable conditions, their benefits restored. Of the five remaining, three sailors received honorable discharges by way of an administrative error, one was given a dishonorable discharge due to misconduct unrelated to the court-martial, and one conviction was set aside because the accused man was judged to he mentally incompetent; he received a discharge under honorable conditions.

Continued pressure from Thurgood Marshall and civil rights groups and the urging of Eleanor Roosevelt finally helped push the Navy in 1946 to desegregate its ships and shore facilities, but the changes came too late for Meeks and his fellow seamen. The Navy "didn't care about us. They were determined to make an example of us to keep the other blacks in line, even if it meant ruining my life," says Morris Soublet, another Port Chicago defendant. "I really believe the men who were sent to prison were railroaded."

Although the fifty defendants saw their sentences reduced to time served, their convictions stood. They were permanently branded as mutineers. It was the beginning of a fifty-year odyssey of fear, pain, and hardship for them. Some changed their names and moved frequently to find jobs while hiding their pasts. "I had to conceal what had happened to me," said Meeks. "I was afraid of what people would say." The most painful part of Meeks's ordeal was his decision not to tell his own children. Only when the plight of the Port Chicago survivors attracted media attention in the early l990s did he summon the nerve to speak to them of his imprisonment. A son, Daryl, a sergeant with the L.A. County Sheriff's department, remembers his father's confession: "He broke down and cried. It was like a dam burst inside of him from the pressure of keeping it a secret."

Still, nothing but wiping the original conviction from their records would bring peace to Meeks and the others accused of the mutiny. In 1977 an attempt by one of the formerly convicted sailors to have his name cleared had gone nowhere. Yet over the years, as the men began to publicize their experience, the Port Chicago story captured wider attention, inspiring a book, two television documentaries, a made-for-TV movie, and articles in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal,and the Christian Science Monitor. The case was reopened briefly in 1994, at the urging of California Reps. Ronald Dellums, George Miller, Fortney "Pete" Stark, and Don Edwards and Sens. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein. They attached a resolution to a military authorization bill calling for the Navy to review the controversial convictions.

There was little to dispute about the facts of the case: Blacks were the only ones forced to load ammunition; they were improperly trained, were offered no leaves after the explosion, and were convicted by an all-white tribunal. According to Adm. William Perry's letter to Representative Dellums, summarizing the Navy's report, the review panel acknowledged that "racial discrimination did play a part in the assignment policies that resulted in African-American sailors being assigned to menial, unskilled work, such as loading ammunition," but it concluded, in what many considered an astonishing twist of logic, that "racial prejudice and discrimination played no part in the court-martial convictions or sentences."

The Navy panel found that "the sailors who refused to load ammunition after the explosion had a reasonable basis for fear . . . [but] the danger to them was no greater than that faced by sailors in combat, and ... seventy other sailors assigned to their divisions followed orders to load ammunition after the explosion."

This is an issue on which the men who participated in the Port Chicago mutiny and military authorities will probably never be able to agree. A huge chasm of perception separates the two sides. While the sailors claim that they were disobeying orders out of fear, and that the very fact of racial discrimination and all that issued from it was enough to justify their acts, the Navy insists that "sailors are required to obey the orders of their superiors even if those orders subject them to grave danger." Thus, the panel's report concludes, "Under military law, an intentional overt act in opposition, resistance, or defiance of superior military authority (as in the case of the fifty sailors who acted in concert to refuse orders) is mutiny."

For those who feel strongly that President Clinton should issue an apology, the continuing silence is painful. There was a brief moment of hope in 1994 when the National Park Service, acting on congressional authorization, dedicated a monument to the dead servicemen at the former Port Chicago, now the Concord Naval Weapons Station. The monument listed the names of the white and black servicemen. killed in the blast, but it didn't mention the mutiny trial or the Port Chicago defendants. However, Meeks and the other black seamen convicted of mutiny were invited to the ceremony, and the fact that they were included was a kind of backhanded acknowledgment by the Navy that the accused men had contributed to the war effort. Meeks took it as a sign that justice would ultimately prevail.

Sandra Evers-Manly, president and founder of the Black Hollywood Education and Resource Center, in Los Angeles, started a support group for the Port Chicago survivors in 1997 and has worked tirelessly on a national write-in campaign to have President Clinton expunge the records of the convicted sailors. And she has taken further steps. "We are talking to a law firm in Washington, D.C., because we now want to take the legal route," said Evers-Manlv. "This year [1999] marks the fifty-fifth anniversary of the blast. All these men wanted was to serve our country by going to war. They were denied that chance because of the color of their skin."

But time is running out. Many of the Port Chicago defendants have died, and others are in poor health. It is important to Meeks that his conviction be erased for his family's sake. "If nothing is done," he says, "then even after I'm gone, my family would still have this hanging over their heads."

President Clinton's failure to act puzzles Meeks and his former shipmates. They have seen the government apologize, pardon, or pay reparations to the victims of the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, to the Japanese-Americans interned in detention camps during World War II, and this past February to the descendants of Lt. Henry 0. Flipper, the first black graduate of West Point, who in 1881 was falsely accused of embezzlement of commissary funds and dishonorably discharged. Meeks still believes that the President will do the right thing. "I think he's been fair to blacks," he says, "and will take an interest in our cause if somebody calls it to his attention."

Meeks hopes that a personal appeal from Daryl, his son, will move Clinton to act before he leaves the White House-and while some of the Port Chicago defendants are still alive. His guarded optimism is rooted in the firm belief that he and the other men charged with mutiny loyally served their country, and that their only crime was being black. *

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is a Pacific News Service commentator and the author of The Assassination of the Black Male Image and The Crisis in Black and Black.