The Mutiny That Wasn't - July 17, 1944
About this episode
The episode discusses the Port Chicago disaster and the subsequent mutiny trial involving Black sailors in 1944.
On July 17, 1944, an ammunition explosion at Port Chicago killed 320 sailors, most of them Black, in the deadliest home-front disaster of World War II. When 258 survivors refused to keep loading bombs under the same unsafe conditions, the Navy charged fifty of them with mutiny, a capital crime, and a young NAACP lawyer named Thurgood Marshall sat through every day of the trial. It took the Navy eighty years, to the exact date, to admit they had been right to refuse.
People in this episode
Host: Richard G Backus
Topics covered
- Port Chicago disaster
- mutiny trial
- Thurgood Marshall
- Navy history
- African American history
Mentioned in this episode
Places: Port Chicago
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