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THIS WEEK IN PEOPLE’S HISTORY, AUG. 7–13  
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_ Next Stop, Vietnam (1964), 80 Years Late, the Mutiny that Never Was
(1944), ‘A Lonely Island of Poverty’ (1964), Warplanes Aren’t
Cheap (1939), Destruction and Devastation (1779), Little Rock’s
Slo-Mo Crisis (1959), A Powerful Union Is Born (1919) _

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_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. [link removed]

_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.
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_‘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.”
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_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.
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_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. [link removed]

_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.
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_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
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