Trial by the Bay: Treasure Island and Segregation in the Navy’s Lake (book chapter)

During the months of September and October 1944, Admiral C. H. Wright, commandant of the Twelfth Naval District, placed fifty black sailors on trial for mutiny at the Treasure Island US Naval Training and Distribution Center. Although this event is largely forgotten or its location confused, the Treasure Island naval base served as a setting where the Navy asserted its power to maintain Jim Crow segregation—frequently misunderstood as a Southern system alone—at the same time that the United States and its allies battled totalitarianism abroad.

The fifty men were survivors of a catastrophic munitions detonation at  the Port Chicago naval magazine, approximately thirty-five miles northeast of Oakland, on the south shore of the Suisun Bay, connected to the enormous San Francisco Bay estuary system. After the blast, they refused to continue working under the same segregated and dangerous conditions. In this essay I explain why this trial was no exception for Treasure Island and the Bay Area—and why its convenient forgetting, along with its disappearance of its evidence from the physical space of Treasure Island, serves the same conditions that gave rise to it.

“Trial by the Bay: Treasure Island and Segregation in the Navy’s Lake” (2017). Urban Reinventions: San Francisco’s Treasure Island. Lynne Horiuchi and Tanu Sankalia, eds. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press: 125-139.

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