Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

This day, late summer, 1944, a group of about 50 naval sailors and officers are facing mutiny

charges for refusing to work at a California port where they were being asked to load munitions.

Now this moment in the last week of August, first week of September, is happening in the

context of something that had happened about a month earlier, a massive explosion at this munitions depot that had killed 320 men, men in the Navy and some civilians,

220 of those men were black.

And now the sailors, about a month later,

were being asked to basically do the same sort of work

that led to that disaster, loading munitions under unsafe conditions and many

of them refused and many of them were then court-martialed so that is the moment

that we're in right now a work stoppage threat of mutiny a controversial

trial on the horizon so let's get into that and also the details of this

explosion which are absolutely wild and also I guess I should say there's also

a third good Marshall element to this story as well.

So there's a lot going on here, really fascinating here to discuss, as always,

are Nicole Hammer of Columbia and Kelly Carter Jackson of Wellesley.

Hello there.

Hello, Jody. Hey there. I I should say I love all of our

episodes equally. They're like my children you know I only have one child but I have many

episodes but I love them all equally.

But there are some that are just like, whoa, you know, and they catch me and they and you see just elements and elements.

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