The race riot at Agana

On the night of 25/26 December 1944 shots were fired from a passing jeep at the camp of black US Marines near Agana, the capital of Guam. The sentries returned fire, and a group of armed black Marines set off in pursuit of the attackers towards the town. They were stopped at a military police roadblock. So ended the incidents that had been going on since Christmas Eve, known as the Agana race riot – one of the most serious conflicts between white and black servicemen in the US armed forces during the Second World War.

War chronologies sometimes place the event under 26 December as the day on which “racial tensions in the American military erupted into riots”. The date refers to the climax and the arrests; the incidents themselves lasted from 24 to 26 December, and tension had been building since the autumn.

A segregated military

The US armed forces fought the Second World War as a racially segregated military. Black Americans were subject to the draft on the same terms as whites, but they served in separate units, usually under white officers, and were most often assigned to support units – construction, transport and supply. Exceptions such as the black air unit trained at Tuskegee were the result of pressure from African American organisations and the White House.

The Navy and the Marine Corps held out longest. Until 1942 the Marine Corps did not accept black recruits at all. Only a decision by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox opened the way: from June 1942 recruits were trained at a separate camp, Montford Point in North Carolina. By the end of the war some 19,000–20,000 black servicemen had passed through the Corps. Most went to depot and ammunition companies, which unloaded ships and carried supplies and ammunition on the beaches – often under fire, as on Saipan and Peleliu – but were not formally combat units.

Tensions surfaced in many places. In July 1944, in the Port Chicago disaster in California, an explosion of ammunition being loaded onto ships killed 320 men, including more than 200 black sailors who had been doing this dangerous work without proper training. When several hundred survivors refused to go back to loading, fifty of them were convicted of mutiny. In August 1944 the Fort Lawton riot in Seattle ended in one of the largest military trials of the war in the United States.

Guam after its recapture

Guam, an American possession seized by the Japanese in December 1941, was retaken in the summer of 1944 – after the landing on 21 July and the end of organised resistance on 10 August. The island became one of the main bases in the Pacific: the Seabees built airfields for B-29 bombers, a harbour and naval depots, and at the turn of 1944 and 1945 a forward headquarters was being prepared there for Admiral Chester Nimitz, who moved to the island in January 1945. After the fighting the 3rd Marine Division was also stationed on Guam, preparing for further operations.

At the end of August 1944 the black 25th Marine Depot Company arrived on the island, followed by other companies (including the 27th), assigned to the new Naval Supply Depot. Black sailors from supply and port units also worked there. Their camps, kept apart from the rest of the garrison, lay near Agana – a town wrecked in the fighting, to which the Chamorro population was returning.

An autumn of tension

According to accounts later collected by the court of inquiry, some white Marines of the 3rd Division tried from the outset to keep black servicemen out of Agana, and especially away from local women. Over the following months there were insults, stones and bottles thrown, and even smoke grenades tossed from passing lorries into the camps of black sailors and Marines. Complaints went largely unanswered.

In the autumn two killings took place. A white sailor shot dead a black Marine of the 25th Company in a quarrel over a woman; a sentry of the 27th Depot Company, harassed by a white Marine, shot and fatally wounded him. Both were later court-martialled on charges of manslaughter.

From Christmas Eve to 26 December

On 24 December nine black Marines of the 25th Company were given Christmas passes to Agana as a reward for exemplary service. While they were talking to local women, white Marines opened fire on them. Eight returned to camp; one could not be found. About forty of his comrades climbed onto two lorries and set off for the town to look for him. Someone in the camp warned the military police, who blocked the roads into Agana. At the roadblock a military police officer told the new arrivals that the missing man had returned to camp unharmed, and the lorries turned back. Around midnight a lorry carrying armed white Marines drove into the black camp; they claimed that one of them had been hit by a lump of coral. They left only when ordered to do so by the depot commander.

On Christmas Day two drunken white Marines shot dead a black serviceman returning from Agana to the camp; within a few hours another was killed by a bullet in the town. News of the killings – according to some accounts, also exaggerated rumours – reached the companies. After midnight, now 26 December, the camp was fired on from a jeep carrying white Marines; the sentries returned fire and wounded a white military police officer. Armed black Marines drove after the fleeing attackers towards Agana. At the roadblock outside the town the military police stopped and arrested them.

Inquiry and sentences

The island commander, Major General Henry L. Larsen, convened a court of inquiry. At the time Walter White, executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was in the Pacific, travelling as a war correspondent. On Guam he collected testimony and appeared before the court himself, describing the systematic harassment of black servicemen. According to studies of black Marines in the Second World War, the inquiry identified racial prejudice and provocation by some white servicemen as the background to the incidents, although it was mainly several dozen black men who bore criminal responsibility.

Courts martial charged those arrested with unlawful assembly, rioting, theft of government property (weapons and vehicles) and attempted murder. The number convicted varies between studies – from 43 to 45; the figure most often given is 44 black servicemen, with some sources describing them as Marines and others as sailors of the base. Sentences ranged up to several years’ imprisonment (according to press reports, from four months to four years) and dismissal from the service. Thanks to White’s intervention several white Marines were also tried, but their punishments were markedly lighter. The Navy imposed a news blackout on the affair; it was reported by the African American press, including The Pittsburgh Courier.

The NAACP then campaigned at the Navy Department and the White House for the sentences to be reviewed. In 1946 those convicted who were still serving their sentences were released from prison.

Place in the history of the war

The Agana riot had no effect on the course of the fighting in the Pacific: the depot companies went back to work, and in February 1945 black Marines were unloading supplies on the beaches of Iwo Jima, and later on Okinawa. Together with Port Chicago and Fort Lawton, however, it was one of the clearest signs that segregation was damaging the military itself: it bred violence, undermined discipline and put at risk men who were essential to the logistics of the war.

The Navy drew conclusions faster than the other services. As early as 1944 Secretary James Forrestal approved experimental mixed crews on auxiliary ships, and in February 1946 the Navy formally lifted restrictions on the assignment of black sailors. On 26 July 1948 President Harry Truman issued Executive Order 9981, requiring equality of treatment in the armed forces without regard to race; the Marine Corps disbanded its last segregated units in the early 1950s. The wartime experience of black servicemen – serving abroad in a military that denied them equality at home – became one of the sources of the post-war civil rights movement and of the struggle against Jim Crow laws.