‘Long-Delayed Justice’: Sean Coffey, L’87, and Jonathan Lee, L’90, Lead Exoneration Efforts for WWII Black Sailors

In the aftermath, all of the white officers received convalescent leave, while the enlisted men, largely Black, were ordered to resume loading weapons. Two hundred fifty-eight Black sailors initially refused, citing safety concerns and lack of proper training. All were court-martialed. Fifty men who continued the work stoppage were convicted of mutiny.

Through the intervention of civil rights advocates, including Thurgood Marshall and Eleanor Roosevelt, the sailors’ sentences were reduced, but the convictions remained on their records. Over the ensuing years, the fight for exoneration—by the sailors, their families, military personnel, politicians and lawyers—remained unsuccessful.

On the 80th anniversary of the explosion, at 7:30 a.m., Jonathan Lee, L’90, chair of the Contra Costa County Bar Association’s Port Chicago Task Force, received a call from the Department of the Navy. Working on a volunteer basis, Lee and the task force had initiated a letter-writing campaign several years earlier petitioning the Navy for exoneration.

On the phone was General Counsel of the Navy Sean Coffey, L’87. “He proceeded to tell me that the Secretary of the Navy [Carlos del Toro] had just signed the orders vacating the convictions,” Lee said. “He wanted to let me know that he’d seen our letters and they’d made a big difference. I was overcome.”

“It was a very emotional call,” Coffey said. “I applauded their effort to keep at it when there was no evidence that the Navy would ever hear them. Yet they persisted.”

Trials and Error

Prior to the July 17 phone call, Lee had been unaware that Coffey was conducting his own investigation of the Port Chicago trials on behalf of the Navy.

“I’m a retired naval officer, a Naval Academy grad, and my initial instinct was, it was war, you were ordered to load ammunition needed for the war effort. I have little sympathy for you,” Coffey said. “But I started seeing some things that troubled me.”

Both Coffey and Lee found multiple problems in the Navy’s conduct after the explosion. “All 258 were put on a prison barge under armed guard,” Coffey said. “The Navy later took statements from the 208 who returned to work to be used against the 50 who continued to resist. But they were from different divisions and weren’t party to the conversations those 50 men had while in the brig.”

“We also focused on the fact that the men could not put in evidence the conditions of prior working conditions. We thought that evidence would have been exculpatory for the mutiny charge,” Lee said.

“Given their state of mind after the explosion, they were acting more as whistleblowers, trying to avert the extreme danger officers had put them in. These men conducted themselves with the utmost dignity and respect for their officers.”

Another issue was the right to effective counsel. “The 50 charged with mutiny were divvied up among five so-called counsel, only one of whom was a lawyer,” Coffey said.

“It was a capital case,” Lee added. “We thought that under existing Supreme Court precedent at the time, that was by definition an ineffective defense.”

Convinced that the trials were unfair, Coffey prepared a summary memo to the Secretary focused on the evidentiary issues supporting exoneration, concluding with an appeal to history.

“I said that we cannot turn a blind eye to the way we treated our African American sailors in the ’40s. It’s hard to believe that if these were white sailors, that the following would have happened—then I listed a cascade of all the things that were done wrong.

“I ended with a quote from Thurgood Marshall, ‘Justice demands that these findings be set aside.’”

Honor Restored

During their initial phone call, Coffey and Lee discovered they were fellow Georgetown Law alumni. “I told Sean that because of his work on this issue, ‘I’ve never been so proud to be associated with the same law school,” Lee said.

“I think what we did is consistent with the Jesuit mission and what Georgetown expects of its graduates,” Coffey added.

Both Lee and Coffey view their involvement with the Port Chicago exonerations as life-changing.

“I’ve been fortunate to have an interesting career,” Coffey said, noting the media attention he received as plaintiff’s lawyer in the WorldCom case, a major securities litigation of the early 2000s. “In WorldCom, we just ended up moving money from one bank account to another. But here, we delivered long-delayed justice for 258 patriots.” In October, the Contra Costa Bar Association presented Coffey with its Hero Award in recognition of his role in achieving the exonerations.

“How does it feel to witness a change in the course of history? It might take 80 years, but the nation can correct an injustice,” Lee added. “These sailors at Port Chicago answered the call to serve at a time of great peril to our nation, and now their honor has been restored. There’s no way that mere words can express the value of that to their families, to their communities, to all of us.”