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Many sports fans are not happy that Jackie Robinson’s U.S. Army history was deleted by the Pentagon from the Department of Defense website. Until Tuesday, the website had an article titled, “Sports Heroes Who Served: Baseball Great Jackie Robinson Was WWII Soldier.” Now, it’s gone.
This move by the Pentagon was brought to the attention of many sports fans Tuesday night when ESPN’s Jeff Passan pointed out that the URL for the article about Robinson now includes “deisports” and leads to a “404 – Page not found” message. The original article is still available on the Internet Archive.
“This used to be the URL for a story on the @DeptofDefense website about Jackie Robinson’s time in the Army. The story has been removed. The ghouls who did this should be ashamed,” Passan wrote on X (Twitter). “Jackie Robinson was the embodiment of an American hero. Fix this now.”
Numerous sports fans strongly agreed with Passan’s message and many assume that the article was removed from the Department of Defense website as part of the purge of anything even remotely related to diversity, equity and inclusion programs in government by President Donald Trump’s administration. Articles about Robinson’s military service were also removed from the Army and Air Force websites, according to KSBW News.
A search of the Army’s website for “Jackie Robinson” found 18 results. Of those 18 articles, 14 of them have now been deleted. Including pages titled “U.S. Army Soldiers face off against Romanian National Team in Jackie Robinson Trophy baseball game” and “‘Wagonmasters’ Ruck to Honor Jackie Robinson.”
This is not the first major historical webpage to be taken down amid the administration’s push to stop diversity, equity and inclusion programs across the U.S. government. Articles about Navajo Code Talkers, Iwo Jima flag-raisers and the aircraft that dropped the atomic bomb have all been removed.
Ironically, President Donald Trump announced in February that a statue of Jackie Robinson, along with Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin, Coretta Scott King, Frederick Douglas, Martin Luther King Jr., Muhammad Ali and Kobe Bryant, would be added to his planned National Garden of American Heroes.
Trump created even more controversy on Tuesday when it was reported that his administration removed an explicit ban on segregated facilities, including things like restaurants, waiting rooms and drinking fountains, for federal contractors. President Trump’s executive order removing the ban repealed an executive order signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965 regarding federal contractors and nondiscrimination.
“These provisions that required federal contractors to adhere to and comply with federal civil rights laws and to maintain integrated rather than segregated workplaces were all part of the federal government’s efforts to facilitate the settlement that led to integration in the 1950s and 1960s,” said Melissa Murray, a constitutional law professor at New York University. “The fact that they are now excluding those provisions from the requirements for federal contractors, I think, speaks volumes.”