Port Chicago, 1944: A Girl's Night of Terror and a Sailor's Grave

A night to remember

The night of July 17, 1944 was so hot that every window was open in the 800-square-foot house in Concord, California, where 13-year-old Nancy Gilliland lived with her parents and three siblings; her two younger brothers were sleeping outside in the yard. Nancy was getting ready for bed when a bright flash lit the room, followed by a tremendous explosion that threw her against the door. Hearing her brothers scream, she thought a bomb had fallen in the backyard; her father ran to them.

For Nancy, a young white girl in suburban housing several miles from the Port Chicago Naval Magazine, the blast was frightening and visceral — for a few minutes she believed her home was under attack, a fear many shared in wartime. Decades later she called it a night to remember. For the sailors and their families, though, it was a personal and political tragedy: a self-inflicted wound that reflected America's historic and continuing racial inequality.

The deadliest home-front disaster

Port Chicago was the largest ammunition transshipment facility on the West Coast. Its almost 1,500 African American sailors served in a segregated unit and faced systemic racism: limited roles despite combat training, unsafe working conditions, and slurs and indignities from white counterparts. Put to work as stevedores under white officers, they got no specialized training in loading the explosives.

That night two cargo ships exploded — the deadliest home-front disaster of World War II. It killed 320 people and injured hundreds more; it registered 3.4 on the Richter scale and was felt more than 450 miles away. Nancy's father, who worked for PG&E, found shrapnel while repairing power lines more than a mile from the depot. Most of the dead were young African American sailors, and only a few dozen could be identified. Survivors had to do the grim work of gathering remains.

Eugene Coffee Jr., 1941. NPS Collections, POCH 43.

Survivors expected what white officers received: leave and transfers. Instead — despite the Double V campaign for victory over enemies abroad and discrimination at home — the Navy sent them to nearby Mare Island Naval Shipyard to load ammunition again. When 258 refused, protesting unsafe conditions and discrimination, all were held on a prison barge, and 50 — the "Port Chicago 50" — were convicted of mutiny in the largest such trial in Navy history. After decades of effort by the sailors and their families, the Navy exonerated them on July 17, 2024, eighty years to the day after the explosion.

Eugene Coffee Jr.

One of the dead was Eugene Coffee Jr., 22, one of the few identified. His family knew only that he had died in an explosion on a ship, and assumed it was Pearl Harbor. His nephew Robert Harris grew up hearing his mother's stories about his uncle and, later in life, traced him through genealogy to a headstone in Golden Gate National Cemetery. Robert had never heard of Port Chicago.

Walking among the graves of the Port Chicago dead in 2018, Harris was overcome by how many young lives had been cut short; it felt, he said, as if their voices were calling from the grave for the truth to be told and justice done.

The meaning of home

Interviewed by the National Park Service in 2023, Harris was not surprised that so few people know about Port Chicago: events in African American history, he said, are rarely taught or remembered. To him, decades of racism made the disaster possible, and the neglect of his uncle's sacrifice is one more way African Americans have been kept from feeling at home in their own country — though, he insisted, it is their home as much as anyone's, earned through labor, service and sacrifice.

Asked why so many in his family served despite such treatment, Harris said they serve to push the country toward what it can and must be — to make America live up to what it says it is. That, he believes, is why his uncle enlisted: to fight for a promised home, where African Americans are accepted as full citizens and all Americans work together against racism.

The protests of the Port Chicago 50 helped push the Navy toward integration, which in turn helped inspire the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s; yet the explosion is largely forgotten. For Nancy, it was a moment when home felt threatened; for Eugene, the Navy's treatment reflected how long African Americans had been barred from feeling at home; for Robert, finding his uncle's grave brought his family closure — a long-awaited homecoming.

Sources

Based on Nicole Martin, "Nancy Gilliland Firsthand Account and Eugene Coffee Jr. Gravesite," Home and Homelands exhibition, National Park Service, made possible in part by a grant from the National Park Foundation; a work of the United States government in the public domain. It draws on Nancy Gilliland's firsthand account (2019) and Robert Harris's 2023 interview, both held by Port Chicago Naval Magazine National Memorial, whose words are paraphrased here; the park's Foundation Document; Dewhitt Jarnison's oral history (1999); and the Treasure Island Museum's online exhibit; rewritten in hubnx's own words.