WASHINGTON, DC – The Defense Department website last week re-uploaded an article based on Jackie Robinson’s decorated military career after removing it as part of a DEI rollback initiative, the Guardian reported.
Robinson, the first Black American to be allowed to play in previously segregated Major League Baseball in 1947, served in WWII where he “was commissioned as a second lieutenant in 1943 and assigned to a tank regiment,” according to the Guardian.
The Guardian explained Robinson faced discrimination when he served in the military and, in 1944, Robinson refused to sit in the back of an army bus which led to him being “court-martialed and acquitted.” Robinson went on to serve “as an athletics coach before being honorably discharged,” the Guardian disclosed.
The Guardian stated that to celebrate Robinson’s accomplishments, Trump claimed a statue to honor Robinson will be added to the garden of national heroes.
Last month, Trump described Jackie Robinson as one of the “Black legends” who helped “drive our country forward to greatness,” the Guardian wrote.
The Guardian said, despite President Trump’s previous remarks, the article that recounted Robinson’s feats within the military during WWII was removed from the Defense Department’s website March 18.
The page that had featured the article was “taken down and ‘dei’ added to the URL,” reported ESPN’s Jeff Pasan, the Guardian wrote.
According to the Guardian, Robinson’s page was not the only article removed from the website.
A page featuring Ira Hayes was removed from the website along with “Native American code talkers” (who used their native languages to confuse enemy codebreakers), the Guardian detailed.
The Guardian stated Ira Hayes was a Native American Marine “who was one of the marines pictured raising the American Flag at Iwo Jima.”
The pages removed were a result of the Pentagon’s recent work to remove “any web page it considers to be representative of DEI programs,” the Guardian explained, adding the DEI rollback came at the behest of President Trump’s executive order to end DEI programs.
Robinson’s page was quickly restored the next day and John Ullyot, the Pentagon Press Secretary, claimed the Defense Apartment “loves Jackie Robinson” and was looking into pages that could have been accidentally removed, reported the Guardian.
The Guardian revealed the Defense Department website restored the page but Sean Parnell, the Defense Department spokesperson, claimed DEI removals were justified, adding that “anybody that says in the Department of Defense that diversity is our strength is, frankly, incorrect,” the Guardian wrote.
