Officials at the University of California, Berkeley’s Regional Oral History Office are looking to a July 23 memorial service for the hundreds of servicemen and civilians killed and hurt in this disaster to aid the office’s search for first-hand accounts of the 1944 accident that helped desegregate the U.S. military. The Regional Oral History Office (ROHO) has initiated interviews with surviving witnesses to the explosion of more than 5,000 tons of TNT while mainly African-American sailors loaded munitions in Port Chicago, California. 320 servicemen and civilians died. For more information about this interesting and little known event, click here.