UC Berkeley

Located in the San Francisco Bay Area, Port Chicago came to international attention on July 17, 1944 when two ammunition ships exploded, killing 320 military personnel. Two-thirds of those killed were African American stevedores ordered to load munitions under a segregated Navy. It was the worst domestic disaster during World War II. Three weeks after the blast, hundreds of survivors refused to return to work in a spontaneous wildcat strike. Fifty of these men were convicted of mutiny charges by an all-white military tribunal, a catalyst for the 1948 Executive Order that desegregated the Armed Forces. When President Barack Obama signed the 2010 defense budget, he also approved a subsection that created a new national park: The Port Chicago Naval Magazine National Memorial. While the creation of the national park could be conflated with a symbolic closure to these struggles, my research finds that the memory of Port Chicago is contested through various spatial imaginaries. Furthermore, because the site is ensconced within an active base, the military controls access to this memorial--a rare case. As such, it crystallizes usually unnoticed tensions between public space and national memory. I study these tensions at Port Chicago and other Bay Area sites of the World War II home front related to the popularized "Port Chicago story." I find that different groups create their own narrative of the military past, sometimes challenging National Park Service narratives, and sometimes also exacerbating social and racial separation.