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A Defense Department article honoring the military legacy of baseball legend Jackie Robinson briefly joined the ranks of disappeared tributes to historic figures lauded for shattering race and gender-based barriers Wednesday, amid a broader effort to wipe out all traces of diversity, equity and inclusion across the federal government.
A tribute to Robinson, renowned for breaking through Major League Baseball’s color barrier in 1947, disappeared from the DOD’s website Wednesday but was restored later in the afternoon.
The article chronicles Robinson’s military service during World War II, when he served in the 761st “Black Panthers” tank battalion, and notes that he was court-martialed but eventually acquitted after refusing to move to the back of an Army bus in 1944. He received an honorable discharge later that year.
But that legacy disappeared from the Defense Department’s website on Wednesday, an apparent casualty of its efforts to erase anything that could be perceived as “diversity, equity and inclusion” under a Trump administration directive.
Later Wednesday, the Defense Department said it would not highlight the history of notable service members like Robinson — or other heroes including the Navajo Code Talkers, the Tuskegee airmen and Ira Hayes, one of the flag-raising Marines at Iwo Jima, which have also disappeared from military websites — on the basis of their race, ethnicity or sex. Critics have said that these deletions basically amount to a haphazard purge of information about anyone who was not a white male.
Still, Pentagon press secretary John Ullyot insisted in a Wednesday afternoon statement that “everyone at the Defense Department loves Jackie Robinson, as well as the Navajo Code Talkers, the Tuskegee airmen, the Marines at Iwo Jima and so many others.”
But the Pentagon’s admiration is limited to the service members’ “patriotism and dedication” — just like “every other American who has worn the uniform.”
Although the historical figures all have been acclaimed for their persistence in service despite obstacles related to their gender, race or ethnicity, Ullyot emphasized that the Pentagon would “not view or highlight them through the prism of immutable characteristics,” and that doing so through DEI would constitute “a form of Woke cultural Marxism.”
Ullyot also alluded to “rare cases” where content may be “either deliberately or by mistake” removed, but did not directly address whether the Pentagon considered those tributes in that category.
Many pages memorializing the legacies and contributions of non-white service members have disappeared entirely, while others have vanished and then been reinstated.
World War II veteran Medgar Evers, a Mississippi civil rights activist who was assassinated in 1963, was erased from the Arlington National Cemetery website. The Army removed and subsequently reinstated a website dedicated to the 442nd Regimental Combat team, the most decorated unit in military history, made up of Japanese-American soldiers who fought despite the internment of their families. One of those soldiers, Daniel Inouye, later became a long-serving U.S. senator from Hawaii.
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