Last week, it was discovered that an article about Jackie Robinson—the civil rights pioneer who broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier in 1947—was removed from the U.S. Department of Defense website as part of the Trump Administration’s purge of materials deemed related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). After a twenty-four-hour groundswell of criticism from the media and the public, the Pentagon then restored the article to their website.
The article, which was published in 2021 as part of a series on veteran athletes called “Sports Heroes Who Served,” outlines Robinson’s life story and contributions to the Civil Rights Movement, including his 1944 court-martialing for refusing to move to the back of an Army bus while serving in the military.
Since Donald Trump’s Inauguration, the Pentagon has removed tens of thousands of images and articles deemed DEI-related from its website. Other content purges have included information about suicide prevention, sexual assault, and Holocaust rememberance, as well as information about women and minority veterans buried at Arlington National Cemetery and pages celebrating Ira Hayes, an Akimel O’odham Native American soldier who helped raise the Flag on Iwo Jima.
The removal of the Robinson article was first brought to public attention by Matthew Reichbach, a journalist with newmexico.news. After reading about the removal of Navajo Code Talkers content from the Marine Corps website, Reichbach, a Dodgers fan, was curious to see if he could find any mention of Robinson.
“I’m not sure why the page was deleted,” Reichbach wrote to The Progressive in an email, noting that other articles in the “Sports Heroes Who Served” series were still up, including two that explicitly mention Robinson: a piece about Branch Rickey, the executive who signed Robinson, and one about former Robinson teammate and close friend Pee Wee Reese.
“The best way to make sense of it is to not try and complicate [why the page was deleted],” sports historian and author Howard Bryant tells The Progressive. “You are dealing with a hostile force in this country. It’s not being hidden. It’s not complicated. The only reason it is complicated is because most people, usually white people, want to believe in their [own] inherent goodness. So it’s difficult to think that somebody would be malicious, especially against someone like Jackie Robinson, whom they used and used as an example of their inherent goodness.”
On April 15, Bryant notes, Major League Baseball will celebrate Jackie Robinson Day. “Everyone will wear his number in Major League Baseball as a symbol of how far we’ve come,” Bryant says. “And yet, Major League Baseball, to my knowledge, has not even made a statement about this. Even though they all profit, whether it’s financially or socially or emotionally or morally from this man.”
“There are so many gaps in the pages of American history books,” says Bob Kendrick, President of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City. “If you were going to look at one single episode that led to the integration of baseball in this country, it would have been World War Two. All these young Black soldiers dying . . . . That created a groundswell from many who said, ‘If they can die fighting for their country, why can’t they play baseball in this country?’”
“To me,” Kendrick says, “it’s almost impossible to not tell the stories of these segregated troops, these experiences.”
The Progressive contacted the Department of Defense on March 19 for comment, and was emailed a statement at 1:26 p.m. from Pentagon Press Secretary John Ullyot, which reads, “As Secretary Hegseth has said, DEI is dead at the Defense Department. Discriminatory Equity Ideology is a form of Woke cultural Marxism that has no place in our military.”
At 1:41 p.m. The Progressive followed up with the Pentagon to ask if Jackie Robinson’s page was removed in error, or if the Department of Defense considers celebration of Jackie Robinson as falling under the category of “cultural Marxism”—a term which has long been used as a racist and antisemitic trope. The Pentagon representative responded that they had “nothing additional to add at this time.”
Approximately one hour later, the article on Jackie Robinson was restored to the website.
“It’s a miracle!” said Kendrick after the article was restored, laughing.
Reichbach wrote to The Progressive that while he is glad to see Robinson’s page restored online, “I’m more worried about the other posts from people not as famous as Jackie Robinson who had their stories deleted. How many are still out there that we just don’t know about and maybe never will?”
A second statement was issued from Pentagon Press Secretary John Ullyot at 2:46 p.m.
“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—we salute them for their strong and, in many cases, heroic service to our country, full stop. We do not view or highlight them through the prism of immutable characteristics, such as race, ethnicity, or sex. We do so only by recognizing their patriotism and dedication to the warfighting mission like ever [sic] other American who has worn the uniform.
We are pleased by the rapid compliance across the Department with the directive removing DEI content from all platforms. In the rare cases that content is removed—either deliberately or by mistake—that is out of the clearly outlined scope of the directive, we instruct the components and they correct the content so it recognizes our heroes for their dedicated service alongside their fellow Americans, period.”
The next day, March 20, Ullyot was removed from his position as Pentagon spokesperson and was expected to be reassigned elsewhere in the Defense Department. Sean Parnell, another spokesperson in the department, has taken Ullyot’s place.
“Because of the realities of AI tools and other software, some important content was incorrectly pulled offline to be reviewed,” Parnell said in a video posted on X. “We want to be very, very clear. History is not DEI.”
Dave Zirin, sports editor of The Nation and columnist at The Progressive, said on March 19, “This was just a big AI oopsie,” and added sarcastically, “and not that their AI is programmed to be racist.”
Bryant tells The Progressive that this war on DEI shows how little progress has actually been made. “Paul Robeson said it in the 1920s. And it was true in the 1950s. And it’s true now . . . . [He said] ‘You know, this country never expected to compete against us. We were brought here to work for them—not with them, for them.’ ”
Bryant continues, “So to treat Jackie Robinson as though he’s some sort of concoction of the imagination is not very far from some variation of what I’ve seen my whole life.”
“Donald Trump is doing this for them,” Bryant says about white people, “whether they like it or not, to not compete against us. To not feel like anything we’ve accomplished was due to simply being better. It’s always because of something you didn’t earn or something that was given to you. Because if it’s given to you, then somebody is still on top of you. If it’s earned you don’t need them.”