In the chapter titled 'The Fifty' the Navy claimed that unreasonable and irrational fear was the reason the Black Sailors refused to load ammunition. What other factors led to the decision to not work?

From the text:

Shaken by the death of their workmates and afraid that another explosion might occur, 50 men refused. They were all court martialed, convicted of mutiny and sentenced to up to 15 years of hard labor.

Albert Williams: We was not trained to load ammunition. We would take ammunition, we'd take a crow bar when we had to go so high, we'd take that crow bar and push that ammunition up there because they told us it would not explode cause it didn't have no detonator in it. We believed that.

Albert Williams: And they give us a ultimatum, "Would you load ammunition?" That's the ultimatum we had. And I told 'em myself, I say, "I am absolutely afraid, which I were. I'm afraid to load ammunition". "You step over there then." Then they call another one of 'em I think he asked him the same thing. "You step over there." And when the end of the day was over I think just about all of us had stepped over there, you know.

Joe Small: I didn't know anything about mutiny. I just knew that I didn't want to work under the same conditions that I did work under and advance the chance of the same thing happening again.