TITLE: The Port Chicago 50: Disaster, Mutiny, and the Fight
for Civil Rights
AUTHOR: Steve Sheinkin
PUBLISHER: Roaring
Brook Press
COPYRIGHT DATE: 2014
AGE RANGE: 10-14
years
LEXILE LEVEL: 950L
ACCELERATED READER:
Level: 6.7, Points: 6
SUMMARY:
Before Rosa Parks sat on a bus and
said “No”, before Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “had a dream”, before Jackie
Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball, before Civil Rights became a
movement…50 young African-American men joined the U. S. Navy during World War
II.
At the time, the U. S. Armed Forces were segregated. White soldiers and
sailors and African-American soldiers and sailors had separate bunk houses, ate
separately and performed separate duties. At the U. S. Naval Base of Port
Chicago in California, it was the duty of African-American sailors to load
ammunition (bombs) onto war ships. Many of these sailors were young—still
in their teens. The young sailors felt they were not given proper
training in handling such dangerous cargo. On July 17, 1944, a massive
explosion occurred on the loading dock of Port Chicago, sinking two war ships,
leveling the loading pier, killing 320 servicemen and wounding hundreds
more.
The surviving servicemen were transported to a nearby naval base to return to
duty. Find out what happens next when these same sailors were ordered to
load ammunition again.
CRITIQUE:
Very interesting non-fiction book from the author of Bomb (a 2015 Rebecca Caudill nominee) about the racial views and
eventual de-segregation of the U. S. Armed Forces, specifically the U. S.
Navy. When these 50 understandably frightened young men refused to load ammunition
again, but would do any other given task, they were arrested and tried for
mutiny (which came with a death sentence) and all found guilty.
Thurgood Marshall, a lawyer at the time, followed their case and later appealed
the guilty verdict. He was unsuccessful. By this time, WWII was
over and the nation would have regarded the death sentence for these 50 young
men in this high-profile case as extreme. They were quietly released from
the Naval prison and put back on active duty in the Navy, but were branded as
mutineers for the rest of their lives.
REVIEW:
Receiving a starred
review, Kirkus reports, “In this thoroughly researched and well-documented
drama, Sheinkin lets the participants tell the story, masterfully lacing the
narrative with extensive quotations drawn from oral histories, information from
trial transcripts and archival photographs.” (Kirkus, 2013)
AWARDS:
“2014 Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for
Excellence in Nonfiction
2014 National Book Award Finalist
2015 Carter G. Woodson Book Award”
(Sheinkin, 2017)
RELATED MATERIAL:
American Patriots:
the Story of Blacks in the Military from the Revolution to Desert Storm
by Tonya Bolden
Courage has No Color: the True Story of the Triple
Nickles: America's first Black Paratroopers by Tanya Lee Stone
Thurgood Marshall
by Lisa Aldred
REFERENCES:
Kirkus. (2013,
November 20). Kirkus Review: The Port Chicago 50 Disaster, Mutiny, and
the Fight for Civil Rights. Retrieved from https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/steve-sheinkin/port-chicago-50/
Sheinkin, S. (2017). The
Port Chicago 50 Disaster, Mutiny, and the Fight for Civil Rights. Retrieved
from http://stevesheinkin.com/books/the-port-chicago-50/
