Chapter eight: World War II and the Black West

PORT CHICAGO
The Port Chicago Naval Base, completed in 1942 and located about thirty-five miles northeast of San Francisco, quickly became the major west coast facility for the loading of ammunition for the Pacific Theater. Almost from the beginning of the base, African American naval personnel were the majority of the workforce. On the evening of July 17, 1944, about half of the black stevedores stationed at the facility were loading two ships, the Quinalt Victory and E.A. Bryan when an explosion, the equivalent of a small earthquake, destroyed the ships and dock and leveled the nearby town of Port Chicago. Three hundred twenty men, 202 of them African American, were killed instantly in the explosion. The black sailors killed and wounded at Port Chicago accounted for 15% of all African American naval casualties during World War II. Following the explosion 50 black sailors were put on trial for mutiny when they refused to resume loading the ammunition. The following account, eyewitness Cyril Sheppard, an enlisted man in the barracks during the explosion, describes the first moments of the tragedy.
I was sitting on the toilet--I was reading a letter from home. Suddenly there were two explosions. The first one knocked me clean off... I found myself flying toward the wall. I just threw my hands up like this, then I hit the wall. Then the next one came right behind that, Phoom! Knocked me back on the other side. Men were screaming, the lights went out and glass was flying all over the place. I gout out to the door. Everybody was... that thing had...the whole building was turned around, caving in. We were a mile and a half away from the ships. And so the first thing that came to my mind, I said, 'Jesus Christ, the Japs have hit!' I could have sworn they were out there pounding us with warships or bombing us or something. But one of the officers was shouting, 'It's the ships! It's the ships! So we jumped into one of the trucks and we said let's go down there to see if we can help. We got halfway down there on the truck and stopped. Guys were shouting at the driver, go on down, What the hell are you staying up here for? The driver says, 'Can't go no farther.' See, there wasn't no more docks. Wasn't no railroad. Wasn't no ships. And the water just came right up to...all the way back. The driver couldn't go no farther. Just calm and peaceful. I didn't even see any smoke."
Source: Robert L. Allen, The Port Chicago Mutiny: The Story of the Largest Mass Mutiny Trial in U.S. Naval History (New York: Amistad Press, 1993), p. 58.


BLACK PORTLAND WOMEN AND POST-WAR DISCRIMINATION
In the following account historian Amy Kesselman describes the difficulties African American women faced when the Portland-Vancouver shipyards closed immediately after World War II.
Among the women who had most difficulty adjusting to reconversion were black women and women in the higher age brackets (over thirty-five). In her study of women wage earners in four cities, Lois Helmbold demonstrated that during the Depression younger women who were black and/or over thirty-five were displaced by younger, white workers. During the war older women moved back into the work force, and black women of all ages moved from domestic and service work to industrial work. In the reconversion period, these women...confronted the restoration of prewar conditions.

About half of the black population left the Portland-Vancouver area after the war, and those that remained faced widespread discrimination by employers and unions. The United States Employment Service (USES) did not force employers to hire black workers, because employers threatened to find workers elsewhere. USES officials concluded that it was "unwise and the wrong approach to attempt to force employers to hired colored workers against their will" after thirty firms stopped using USES during the war when they were pressured to hire black workers. Members of the Portland chapter of the Urban League, which had been established during the war, thought that USES workers themselves lacked "racial tolerance" and were not doing enough to change the policies of local industries. Portland, according to Urban League members, was the most bigoted city on the West Coast.

Black women, of course, faced double discrimination. Only two Portland area manufacturing establishments registered with the USES would employ black women: a garment factory and a bag factory that operated two segregated buildings, one for white workers and the other for black workers. The Urban League tried to improve employment prospects for black workers by pressuring unions and employers to end discriminatory practices and by reluctantly acting as an employment agency for black workers. Black women seeking the help of the USES or the Urban League were often urged to take work in domestic service, which "most of them are reluctant to do...because they object to the wage scales and the working conditions." According to the USES, many of the black women looking for work were married and unable to live at their place of employment, a requirement for many domestic jobs.

Margaret Kay Anderson, field secretary for the Women's Bureau reported that "many of the colored women who worked during the war are out of the labor market because they had no intention of working when the war was over." She did not explain how the USES knew that these women had been planning to retire from the work force and were not discouraged by the limited opportunities for black women workers...

Despite efforts to find alternatives, two of the three black women worked as domestics in the postwar period. Audrey Moore, who was the sole support of her child, reported having difficulty finding jobs--a difficulty compounded by being female and black, and by not having a high-school education. Housecleaning, poultry work, and seasonal cannery work were all she could find. Marie Merchant cleaned Pullman cars for a while and then did domestic work for private families. Beatrice Marshall...who had been trained as a machinist but was a victim of racial discrimination in the shipyards, worked at the bag factory until it closed in 1946, when she got a job as a page in the public library...