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, died on July 10 at his home in Benicia, in Northern California. He was 82.

On July 17, 1944, two ships being loaded with munitions in Port Chicago, California exploded. Over 4,000 tons of bombs, shells, depth charges, and fuel erupted in two shock waves that were felt by seismographs at the University of California, Berkeley. The second, larger shock wave was equivalent to a 3.4 magnitude earthquake. The calamity killed 320 people of which 220 were black seamen.

Port Chicago was staffed principally by African American sailors and commanded by White officers. Convinced that their lives had been needlessly put at risk 258 surviving black seamen refused to load ammunition under the same unsafe, segregated conditions that sparked the explosion. Threatened by court marshal, 208 of the seamen backed down. 50 of them, however, refused and were convicted of mutiny and sentenced to prison. 

Eight decades later, the Port Chicago disaster is often overlooked in the history of World War II.  Nevertheless, the court-martial attracted the attention of the NAACP and other civil rights groups, and publicity surrounding the trial help spur the desegregation of the Navy in 1946.

As we posted last April, singer and actor Harry Belafonte, who had enlisted in the Navy and was assigned to Port Chicago but narrowly missed the explosion, said of the disaster and subsequent trial, “the Port Chicago mutiny was one of America’s ugliest miscarriages of justice, the largest mass trial in naval history, and a national disgrace. It was the worst home-front disaster of World War II, but almost no one knows about it or what followed.”

Robert L. Allen,  a professor and scholar of African American studies and the author of the 1989 book “The Port Chicago Mutiny: The Story of the Largest Mass Mutiny Trial in U.S. Naval History” helped to shine a light on the often ignored history of the mutiny. Dr. Allen interviewed scores of survivors for his book about the disaster and its aftermath.

Due to the work of Dr. Allen and other civil rights activists, the US Navy officially exonerated all 258 Black sailors, none of whom are still alive, on the 80th anniversary of the explosion at Port Chicago. 

The exoneration, on July 17, came a week too late for Robert Allen, an emeritus professor of Ethnic Studies and African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley who died on July 10.

Robert L. Allen was an adjunct professor of African-American Studies and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Allen received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, San Francisco, and previously taught at San José State University and Mills College. He was Senior Editor (with Editor-in-Chief and Publisher Robert Chrisman) of The Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research, published quarterly or more frequently in Oakland, California, by the Black World Foundation since 1969.

Thanks to Alaric Bond for contributing to his post.