Robert L. Allen, Who Shed Light on a Navy Yard Blast and Trial, Dies at 82 (AP Spring 1960)
He wrote of how 50 Black sailors were court-martialed for refusing to keep loading munitions after explosions in 1944 killed hundreds. They were exonerated this month.
www.nytimes.com By Robert Sandomir
Robert L. Allen, who definitively told the story of 50 Black sailors who were convicted of conspiracy to commit mutiny for refusing to continue to load munitions onto cargo ships after explosions had blown apart two ships at a California port during World War II, killing hundreds, died on July 10 at his home in Benecia, Calif. He was 82.
He died a week before the Navy exonerated the men. His former wife Janet Carter said the cause was kidney failure.
“The secretary of the Navy called to offer condolences,” Ms. Carter said in an interview, referring to Carlos Del Toro. “And he said, ‘I’m going to do more than that — I’m going to exonerate these sailors.’”
Ms. Carter, who remained close to her former husband, a writer, activist and academic, added, “I cried in part because Robert wasn’t here to see it.”
On the night of July 17, 1944, hundreds of sailors were loading ordnance and ammunition onto the E.A. Bryan at the Port Chicago Naval Magazine, northeast of San Francisco. Suddenly, the munitions in the holds detonated, destroying the ship, the pier and structures in a 1,000-foot radius. Another ship, the Quinault Victory, blew apart and sank nearby in Suisun Bay. The blasts killed 320 sailors, civilians and Coast Guard personnel, most of them Black. Nearly 400 were injured, also mostly Black.
White officers were given leave to recover, but Black sailors were soon ordered to continue their dangerous work loading munitions at a nearby port. They did not know why the ships had exploded — a cause has never been determined — and 258 refused to keep working, leading an admiral to threaten to execute them by firing squad, Mr. Allen said.
The Black sailors were arrested and taken to the hold of a barge that had room for 75 men. “The scene conjured up images of a slave ship,” Mr. Allen told The Sacramento Bee in 1997. Of the 258 men, 208 returned to work, but they were still court-martialed for disobeying orders. The 50 others, in a summary court-martial, were convicted of conspiracy to commit mutiny and sentenced to eight to 15 years of confinement. One of the sailors, Martin Bordenave, told Mr. Allen: “How could it be a mutiny? I didn’t talk to nobody. I didn’t conspire with nobody. I just made up my mind, I was tired of it, you know. I wanted to be a sailor.”
In early 1946, 47 of the 50 men were released from prison under pressure from the National Negro Council and the Urban League as well as from Eleanor Roosevelt and Thurgood Marshall, the future Supreme Court justice who was chief counsel of the N.A.A.C.P. at the time and who had attended the trial.
In an appeal, Mr. Marshall argued before the judge advocate general in 1945 that the men, at worst, had disobeyed an order, not mutinied, and that they should be exonerated. “I can’t understand why, whenever more than one Negro disobeys an order, it is mutiny,” he said. Their convictions were upheld, but the publicity over the episode was a catalyst for the Navy’s desegregation in 1946.
In clearing 256 of the 258 men (the convictions of the others had been previously set aside, one for mental incompetency, the other for insufficient evidence), Secretary Del Toro said that the defendants had been denied a meaningful right to counsel and that they had been improperly tried together despite conflicting interests.
Mr. Allen was a professor of ethnic studies at Mills College in Oakland, Calif., when he first heard about the Port Chicago case. In the late 1970s, he discovered a faded pamphlet in a library in San Francisco with a picture of Black sailors on its cover under the title “Mutiny?” (The pamphlet had been written by a reporter for a left-wing newspaper at Mr. Marshall’s request.)
Over the next decade, Mr. Allen traveled by bus to interview survivors, some of whom were too ashamed of their mutiny convictions to have told their families. He obtained the transcript of the mutiny trial, scoured documents in federal archives for information on Port Chicago and found Mr. Marshall’s paperwork on the case. He received a Guggenheim fellowship, which helped finance his research.
His book on the episode, “The Port Chicago Mutiny: The Story of the Largest Mass Mutiny Trial in U.S. Naval History,” was published in 1989. “I don’t think you can overstate the significance of the interviews that he did,” Regina Akers, a historian with the Naval History and Heritage Command, said in an interview.
She added, “He gave them a chance to capture their perspective in that season of their lives, about what happened to them and what it was like to be in the Navy — the work they did loading ammunition and the discrimination they faced.”
Robert Lee Allen Jr. was born on May 29, 1942, in Atlanta. His mother, Sadie (Sims) Allen, was a teacher at Spelman College. His father was a mechanic. Both were community activists. Robert, who grew up in segregated Atlanta, was 13 when Emmett Till, then only 14, was tortured and murdered by white men in Mississippi in 1955. Robert learned about the killing through an article in Jet magazine and the horrifying pictures that accompanied it.
“This is when I realized that the white people were not only dangerous, but they were dangerous to all of us, including me, because he was my age,” Mr. Allen said, referring to Emmett Till, in an oral history interview in 2019 with the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught.
After graduating from Morehouse College in Atlanta with a bachelor’s degree in sociology in 1963, Mr. Allen moved to New York City, where he was a welfare caseworker and then a reporter for The National Guardian, a left-wing newsweekly. He earned a master’s degree from the New School for Social Research in 1967.
He began teaching in 1969 at San Jose State University in its Black studies department, then at Mills, where he was chairman of its ethnic studies department. He joined Berkeley in 1994 as a professor of ethnic studies and African American studies. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, San Francisco, in 1983.
Mr. Allen was a longtime editor of The Black Scholar, a Black studies and research journal, which he joined in 1971. He and the novelist Alice Walker, his companion at the time, founded Wild Tree Press, a feminist publishing company, in 1984.
His book “Black Awakening in Capitalist America” (1969) detailed the rise of Black activism. His other books, written or edited by him, included “A Guide to Black Power in America: An Historical Analysis” (1970) and “Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters: C.L. Dellums and the Fight for Fair Treatment and Civil Rights” (2014).
Mr. Allen is survived by his wife, Zelia Bora; his son, Casey Allen, from his marriage to Pamela Parker, which ended in divorce; his sisters, Damaris Kirschhofer, Teresa Coughanour and Rebecca Allen; and three grandchildren.
After publishing his book about the Port Chicago episode, Mr. Allen remained active in campaigns seeking exoneration of the 50 sailors and in the naming of two parks to honor them, one in Concord, Calif.: the Port Chicago Naval Magazine National Memorial.
Even as the Navy considered clearing the sailors, the Port Chicago Alliance, a nonprofit group, persuaded the state of California and cities, counties and organizations in the state to pass resolutions supporting the exoneration; it also organized an inaugural four-day Port Chicago Weekend, a festival in the Bay Area, that began on Thursday and was able to celebrate the exoneration.
Yulie Padmore, the alliance’s executive director, credited Mr. Allen with being a significant champion of justice for the Black sailors. “Without his work, we wouldn’t know what we know today,” she said in an interview. “We wouldn’t be here without him talking to the men and hearing what they wanted to say all along.”
