| “Freddie (October 24, 1919 – June 19, 2003) and Eleanor (August 23, 1922 – October 15, 2010) Meeks. At 1018 Hours on July 17, 1944, an explosion ripped through the United States Navy’s Port Chicago ammunition depot, 30 miles northeast of San Francisco. Navy stevedores, all of them black, were loading shells and bombs aboard the cargo steamship E. A. Bryan, bound for the Pacific. The blast, its cause never determined, killed 320 men, 202 of them black sailors, and injured 390 others. It vaporized a 1,200-foot pier, sank 2 ships and could be felt in Nevada. 3 weeks later, 258 black sailors stationed at Port Chicago were sent to the nearby Mare Island depot to load ammunition. Fearful that another disaster could occur since the Navy had provided no formal training in the dangerous job, the sailors refused to work. Most soon relented, but 50, among them Freddie Meeks, of Natchez, Mississippi, a Seaman 2nd Class, remained adamant. “To see the wreckage and all the people that were killed, the way it blew them all to pieces, you didn’t want to go and fool with it anymore,” he recalled long afterward in a New York Times interview. “You see, there weren’t any bodies, there were just pieces of flesh they shoveled up, put them in those baskets and brought them into the warehouse.” In October 1944, the 50 sailors were convicted of mutiny at a court martial and sentenced to 15 years in prison. Thurgood Marshall (July 2, 1908 – January 24, 1993) of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc. sought to have the verdicts overturned, maintaining that the sailors had been victims of prejudice, since blacks in the Navy could only be laborers, stewards and cooks and that they had never sought to undermine military authority. The Navy upheld the convictions, but Meeks and virtually all the others were released from prison early in 1946 and discharged “under honorable conditions.” The Navy announced then that race would no longer be a factor in filling its jobs. But the stigma of a mutiny conviction remained. Meeks told his wife, Eleanor, about the episode but kept it from his children for almost 50 years. In 1994, a Navy review panel upheld the convictions on the ground that race was not a factor in the verdicts. But it found that assigning black sailors to manual labor had been “clearly motivated by race and premised on the mistaken notion that they were intellectually inferior.” In December 1999, President Bill Clinton (August 19, 1946 -) pardoned Meeks, 1 of 3 known survivors of the 50 convicted sailors. Clinton noted the segregation in the wartime Navy and the trauma resulting from the explosion. Since pardons do not expunge convictions, it was a symbolic gesture.” | |
| Image Filename | wwii1735.jpg |
| Image Size | 55 KB |
| Image Dimensions | 700 x 477 |
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| Photographer Title | |
| Caption Author | Written or Adapted by Jason McDonald |
| Date Photographed | December 1, 1942 |
| Location | |
| City | Natchez |
| State or Province | Mississippi |
| Country | United States |
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| Record Number | |
| Status | Caption ©2026 MFA Productions LLC Please Do Not Duplicate or Distribute Without Permission; Image in the Public Domain |
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