Dr. Robert Allen, Ph.D. was a great historian, telling truth to power about African-American and Civil Rights history. The exoneration of the 50 Port Chicago defendants comes a little late -- they're all dead now. From The Washington Post:
Robert Allen, champion of Black sailors in ’44 mutiny case, dies at 82
He documented the story of sailors who refused to resume loading cargo ships after a deadly explosion at Port Chicago. The Navy exonerated them this month.
Eight decades later, the Port Chicago disaster is often overlooked in the history of World War II. But the munitions explosion — its exact cause was never determined — marked one of America’s worst home-front disasters during the conflict and became a tragic symbol of injustice in a military still cleaved by segregation.
Port Chicago was staffed principally by African American sailors and commanded by White officers. Almost two-thirds of the blast victims were Black. Convinced that their lives had been needlessly put at risk, 258 Black sailors refused to return to work after the incident until enhanced safety protocols were put in place.
Threatened with court-martial and potential execution, 208 resumed their duties but were still charged with refusal to obey orders. Fifty held firm and were convicted of conspiracy to commit mutiny, in the largest mutiny trial in Navy history.
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. But the surviving sailors remained pained by their convictions, which stayed on the books until this month, when Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro issued a formally exoneration.
Dr. Allen, 82, died July 10 at a care facility in Vallejo, Calif. His son, Casey dos Santos Allen, said the cause was kidney failure and other ailments. The exoneration of the sailors took place exactly one week after Dr. Allen’s death, on the 80th anniversary of the blast.
Dr. Allen spent decades as a senior editor at the Black Scholar, one of the country’s oldest Black studies journals; founded a small publishing house in 1984, Wild Trees Press, with novelist Alice Walker, his partner at the time; and taught at a host of California schools, including San José State University, Mills College in Oakland and the University of California at Berkeley.
He was working as a journalist in the 1970s when he first learned of the Port Chicago sailors and was compelled to delve deeper into a story that he saw as a matter of racial injustice. His views aligned with those of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, who ran the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund at the time of the case and helped the sailors mount an appeal.
“I can’t understand why,” Marshall had said, “whenever more than one Negro disobeys an order, it is mutiny.”
Dr. Allen conducted oral histories with survivors of the blast, some of whom had not spoken of their experience even to their families because of the shame of their court-martial convictions.
The sailors had received little training as stevedores but were forced to load munitions — a dangerous task — as White officers made bets on which units would move the fastest. One enlisted man told Dr. Allen that he narrowly missed killing or maiming fellow servicemen on a daily basis because of the speed at which he was required to work.
The blasts, which left the stench of burning flesh in the air, was deeply traumatic to witnesses. White personnel were given 30 days’ leave to rest, while the Black sailors were tasked with searching for survivors and the remains of the dead. Only 51 bodies were identifiable, according to the Navy.
The Black sailors were transferred to another shipyard and commanded to resume their duties loading ships with ammunition. The trial that followed, Dr. Allen said, was a “mockery.” He saw their actions as a wildcat strike, not a mutiny.
“I wasn’t trying to shirk work. I don’t think these other men were trying to shirk work,” Joe Small, a winch operator, told him in an interview. “But to go back to work under the same conditions, with no improvements, no changes, the same group of officers that we had, was just — we thought there was a better alternative, that’s all.”
The 208 men who continued loading lost three months’ pay. The 50 convicted of conspiracy to commit mutiny received sentences ranging from eight to 15 years in confinement. First lady Eleanor Roosevelt helped civil rights activists secure their release in 1946. But the horror and humiliation they had experienced endured.
“It’s an American tragedy,” Mr. Allen told the Los Angeles Times in 1991, referring to the case. “It was the world as it was, and it was pretty grim. These guys were victims of racism and the military legal system.”
Through the efforts of Dr. Allen and other advocates, the military and the public began to reevaluate the mutiny case. A Port Chicago national memorial was dedicated in 1994, and five years later President Bill Clinton pardoned Freddie Meeks, one of the last surviving sailors in the Port Chicago case, and the only one to formally seek a pardon.
Their story was established in large part by 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.”
By the time Del Toro issued the exoneration this month, none of the sailors were alive to see the event. The Navy secretary told The Washington Post at the time that the charges were “a tremendous wrong,” adding that setting aside the convictions “clears their names, restores their honor and acknowledges the courage they displayed in the face of immense danger.”
Dr. Allen suffered at the end of his life from dementia, but “for however brief a moment,” his son said, he seemed to understand that the exoneration was coming.
Several days before he died, Dr. Allen received promising news from Diana McDaniel, a niece of a Port Chicago sailor and a co-founder with Dr. Allen and another activist, David Salniker, of the advocacy and fundraising organization Friends of Port Chicago National Memorial.
Word of the exoneration was not yet confirmed, but Del Toro had committed to attending the upcoming 80th anniversary commemoration. “I figured the secretary of the Navy wasn’t going to give us bad news,” McDaniel said.
Speaking to Dr. Allen on the phone, she recalled, “you could hear the smile in his voice.”
Robert Lee Allen Jr. was born on May 29, 1942, in Atlanta, where his mother was an administrator at Spelman College, a historically Black school for women. His father was a mechanic.
Dr. Allen was less than a year younger than Emmett Till, the 14-year-old African American whose lynching in the Mississippi Delta in 1955 helped galvanize the civil rights movement. Dr. Allen was a regular reader of Jet magazine, which published photographs of Till’s mutilated body.
“I looked at those pictures, and I just could not believe it. It was horrifying,” he said in an oral history with Berkeley in 2019. “I realized this was done by White people to a Black boy who was accused of whistling at a White girl. … 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.”
Dr. Allen received a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Morehouse College in Atlanta in 1963. He moved to New York, where he became one of the first Black journalists at the leftist newspaper the National Guardian, and where he received a master’s degree from the New School for Social Research in 1967.
During the Vietnam War, he was a self-described “draft resister,” later writing that he considered the war “illegal and racist.” He moved to the Bay Area and received a PhD in sociology from the University of California at San Francisco in 1983.
Besides his volume on the Port Chicago case, Dr. Allen wrote or co-wrote books including “Black Awakening in Capitalist America” (1969) and “The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters: C.L. Dellums and the Fight for Fair Treatment and Civil Rights” (2015).
Dr. Allen’s marriages to Pamela Parker and Janet Carter ended in divorce. Survivors include his wife of seven years, Zélia M. Bora of João Pessoa, Brazil; his son, from his first marriage, of San Francisco; three sisters; and three grandchildren.
To Dr. Allen, the Port Chicago sailors offered lessons beyond the immediate significance of their case.
“They were just ordinary boys, teenagers, who changed the most powerful military institution in the world,” he told the Los Angeles Time. “All of us have that in us, to rise up and face injustices and change history.”
1 comment:
The US government isn't beholden to the constitution or obligated to adhere to civil rights. They're a protected class who can do whatever they wish. This can be seen with the erosion of the 4th Amendment by the Patriot Act and those in government willing to violate people's privacy and civil rights..to VHA who does or doesn't do whatever in the hell they want without reprocussion. So while civil rights violations happened more on a local level in the past, now it's happening most often by the federal government itself. Congress has a hard time even getting an honest statement out of those people yet if you get caught lying to them it's your ass.
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