From Peril to Pardon

President Clinton on Thursday pardoned an 80-year-old Los Angeles man convicted of mutiny after a deadly domestic disaster that shed harsh light on racial discrimination in the military during World War II.

As a young sailor, Freddie Meeks was imprisoned after he and 49 other black sailors refused to load live ammunition aboard Navy vessels following an explosion that killed 320 men at the Port Chicago Naval Magazine. The blast rocked the munitions base on Suisun Bay near Concord, Calif., with the force of a small earthquake.

In recent years, as Meeks’ health declined, various black organizations, members of California’s congressional delegation and a Washington law firm joined his family in seeking a presidential pardon.

The pardon “helps bring closure to a shameful episode in U.S. history,” said G. Brian Busey, an attorney in the firm of Morrison & Foerster, who took on Meeks’ case free.

Meeks, who has denounced the charges against him as “just phony,” is believed to be one of only three known survivors of the 50-man crew. It was not clear if the others have sought pardons as well.

“I feel good about it,” Meeks said of Thursday’s pardon. “It should have happened a long time ago.”

He said that he still has the blue uniform shirt with the embossed eagle that he wore when he left the service. “That shows you how much I thought of the Navy, that I kept it all these years,” he said. Meeks added that he may get the shirt altered to fit his more rotund frame, and then wear it when he officially accepts his pardon.

Meeks was among 37 people who received presidential pardons Thursday, a year-end tradition.

During the war, Meeks and his unit were part of a frantic round-the-clock effort to load munitions aboard warships.

Among those killed in the July 17, 1944, blast were 202 black stevedores. The explosion injured 390 others and was so powerful that it shattered windows in downtown San Francisco, about 35 miles south. It was felt as far away as Nevada.

“White soldiers didn’t load ammunition. They walked around,” said Meeks, who was on leave in Oakland when the blast occurred. “We asked if it was dangerous, and they said no, and sure enough, it blew to hell. Thank God we weren’t on it.”

After the blast, white sailors were sent home on leave. But blacks were ordered back to work several weeks later--under what Meeks and the others believed to be the same dangerous conditions.

More than 250 of the black seamen refused to work. Many were court-martialed for disobeying orders and were sentenced to short terms in the stockade.

But 50 of the men, including Meeks, were convicted of mutiny and sentenced to prison terms of up to 15 years. In 1946, Thurgood Marshall--the general counsel of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People who would later become the first black Supreme Court justice--won a ruling that reduced the sentences to 16 months.

Meeks, who had enlisted in 1943, ended up serving three months.

But the conviction cast a shadow over his life.

Before the war, he’d worked as a welder, but no factory would hire a man with a dishonorable discharge. Nor was he able to pursue his dream of joining the Los Angeles Police Department.

So he worked “whatever jobs I could get,” raising three children and supporting his wife, Eleanor.

Despite the pain that the discharge caused him, Meeks said, he would make the same decision now. “What we did, we did for a reason,” he said. “It was because of the way we were treated.”

Nevertheless, Meeks said that for years he hid the fact that he’d been in prison from his sons. He even worked to keep his name out of a book on the Port Chicago disaster for fear his oldest son, an avid reader, would come across it.

“I never thought I’d make it to see this,” he said of the pardon.

But some military historians said Thursday that Meeks’ pardon should not be the final chapter of the Port Chicago tragedy.

“Clearly the victims of Port Chicago--those killed but also those who were court-martialed--were victims of racial bias and racial injustice,” said Ed Dorn, Clinton’s undersecretary of Defense for personnel and readiness until 1997 and now dean of the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.

“My hope is that all of those, like Mr. Meeks, who refused to return to work will be pardoned, even if the pardons are posthumous,” he said.

In 1994, the Navy issued a report, ordered by Congress, admitting that racial discrimination had played a part in the seamen’s work assignments as well as in their separate housing units. But the report also said racial prejudice did not affect the legal actions against those who refused to return to work.

Also that year, on the disaster’s 50th anniversary, the Navy and the National Park Service dedicated a memorial to the dead at Port Chicago, now a part of the Concord Naval Weapons Station.

During the war, Port Chicago was the biggest munitions depot on the West Coast. Crews of black seamen, supervised by white officers, loaded explosives on ships bound for action in the Pacific.

Although the men were under intense pressure to work as quickly as possible, they received little, if any, training on how to properly handle the munitions, which ranged from rifle rounds to 2,000-pound artillery shells.

Some officers even bet on which crew could work the fastest and punished the losing crews with reduced liberty.

On the fateful night, two explosions five seconds apart rocked the loading pier. The first was small. But the second was more than a third as large as the explosion of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima. It demolished two ships and the pier, killing everyone within 1,000 feet.

The precise cause was never determined, but haste in loading was widely believed to have been a factor.

The tragedy prompted the Navy to overhaul its procedures for handling munitions, and the resulting racial controversy played a role in leading President Truman to order the military’s integration in 1948.

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Times correspondent Jessica Garrison in Los Angeles contributed to this story.