Portside

Next Stop is Vietnam

60 YEARS AGO, on August 7, 1964, the U.S. Congress took a fateful step on the road to war by agreeing to the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. The resolution, which passed the House unanimously and the Senate by 88-2, gave the President unlimited authority to make war in Vietnam. Books have been written about the shocking lack of evidence and outright lies used to stampede Congress to pass it and the criminality of the resulting war. https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/gulf-of-tonkin/

80 Years Late, the Mutiny that Never Was

80 YEARS AGO, on August 8, 1944, three weeks had passed since a catastrophic accidental detonation of tons of high explosives 20 miles northeast of Oakland, California. The explosion, in Port Chicago on the Sacramento River, killed 320 U.S. Navy sailors and civilians and injured at least another 390. 

The victims had been loading bombs, artillery shells, naval mines and torpedoes aboard a cargo ship for delivery to U.S. forces fighting the Japanese in the western Pacific. After the catastrophe, the effort to understand what had gone wrong was hampered because almost everyone immediately involved was dead. 

It was common knowledge among the thousands of men working at Port Chicago that the commanders of the munitions facility frequently ordered their men to take dangerous shortcuts to save time. Many squad leaders were widely regarded as “slavedrivers,” a particularly nasty epithet among a workforce that was overwhelmingly African-American.

After the disaster, hundreds of men who had not been hurt because they were far away from the explosion were transferred to a different ammunition depot 15 miles away. Now that the disaster was three weeks in the past, 325 of the disaster’s survivors were ordered back to work and marched from their nearby barracks to the water. When they reached the pier, almost every sailor refused to continue, some of them yelling that the work was far too dangerous. After being harangued by their officers, some of the men relented and started to work, but more than 250 were marched back to their barracks and placed under arrest. Eventually a court martial convicted 50 men of mutiny and 206 of lesser offenses 

Ever since the explosion there had been a tremendous outcry against the Navy’s recklessness and against the evident racism that led to the presence of so many African-Americans doing the potentially deadly work.  But the outcry fell on deaf ears among the military brass, a situation that continued for nearly 80 years. That changed on July 17, 2024, when the Navy bowed to public opinion and exonerated all the men after acknowledging that multiple errors had occurred during the court-martials, including that the sailors were denied a meaningful right to counsel. https://www.naacpldf.org/press-release/ldf-celebrates-the-exoneration-o…

‘A Lonely Island of Poverty’

60 YEARS AGO, on August 9, 1964, Martin Luther King, Jr, delivered a memorable sermon at the Riverside Church in Manhattan. This is a short excerpt:

“As long as the Negro finds himself on a lonely island of poverty, in the midst of a vast ocean of prosperity, as long as millions of Negroes feel that they are exiles in their own land, to see their plight as a long and desolate corridor with no exit sign, as long as millions of Negroes are forced to accept educational situations that are grossly inadequate, as long as millions of Negroes see life as an endless flight with powerful headwinds of tokenism – token handouts here and there – there will be an ever-present threat of violence and riots.”

There had already been substantial racism-related violence in 1964 and there would be more before the end of the year.  But the extent of the violence in 1964 was moderate compared to that of 1965, which is still remembered as “the long, hot summer.” https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/bloody-sunday-selma-…

Warplanes Aren’t Cheap

85 YEARS AGO, on August 10, 1939, the U.S. War Department announced that it had just signed contracts to spend more than $85 million for warplanes, which was the largest peacetime military expenditure the U.S. had ever made.  By the time the U.S. entered World War 2 in December 1941, the U.S. had paid some $13 billion to cover the expense of military preparations. https://www.warresisters.org/store/where-your-income-tax-money-really-g…

Destruction and Devastation in 1779

245 YEARS AGO, on August 11, 1779, a 600-man brigade in the 4-year-old United States Army began to carry out a 5-week campaign of genocide against the Seneca people who lived and farmed in western Pennsylvania and western New York. Under the command of Col. Daniel Brodhead, the soldiers carried out the order of their commander-in-chief, George Washington, to cause “the total destruction and devastation of their settlements.” Brodhead’s short campaign was done in coordination with Gen. John Sullivan’s much larger attack on Native American settlements throughout the Finger Lakes region of central and western New York.

They did so by marching and rowing up the Allegheny River from Pittsburgh and destroying at least 10 good-sized Native American settlements plus hundreds of acres of corn and other crops. They encountered almost no resistance, because the Seneca, who had not the slightest hope of repelling an attack by 605 heavily armed troops, abandoned their towns as soon as they were aware that Brodhead’s men were getting close. Two of the soldiers were slightly wounded in a very brief exchange of fire that took place during one of the expedition’s first days. Those were the only casualties inflicted on Brodhead’s men. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sullivan_Expedition

Little Rock, the Slo-Mo Crisis 

65 YEARS AGO, on August 12, 1959, the long, slow, painful process of putting an end to the segregated schools took a tiny step forward. In Little Rock, Arkansas, Central High School opened for the school year with a student body of about a thousand white students and two African-Americans. The effort to comply with the Supreme Court’s order to eliminate racially segregated schools was almost invisible, but it was a big improvement over the previous school year when Little Rock school never opened and an improvement over the year before that, when Central High was occupied by troops from the U.S. Army to make it possible for nine African-Americans to attend. https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/10/little-rock-still…

A Powerful Union Is Born

105 YEARS AGO, on August 13, 1919, a nationwide strike by 6-year-old Actors’ Equity Association was a week old and growing bigger and more solid every day. The strike’s main objective was to force theater managers to recognize the fledgling union and sign contracts to define wages and working conditions. When the strike began the union had fewer than two thousand members, but the job action achieved so much success that thousands more joined before the theater managers agreed to almost all of Actors’ Equity’s demands. On this day, August 13, two more major New York City theaters were forced to shut their doors, bringing the total of dark performance spaces to 16, plus two more that had scheduled, and been force to cancel, the first presentation of new shows. With each passing day, more shows were closing, and the strike quickly forced productions to shut down in Chicago, the District of Columbia, Boston, Philadelphia, Providence, St. Louis, Atlantic City and Pittsburgh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1919_Actors%27_Equity_Association_strike

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