Jackie Robinson’s Pentagon Page Removed—Then Restored—In DEI Purge

19 Mar 2025 by Sara Dorn · Forbes

Topline

A webpage dedicated to baseball star Jackie Robinson’s military career was removed from the Department of Defense website this week in the Pentagon’s purge of content it deems aligned with diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives—but was later restored after the agency suggested it was a “mistake.”

Jackie Robinson, in military uniform, becomes the first African American to sign with a white ... [+] professional baseball team. He signs a contract with the minor league club in Montreal, a farm team for the Brooklyn Dodgers.Bettmann Archive

Key Facts

The webpage, part of a series on “Sports Heroes Who Served” outlines how Robinson was drafted and assigned to a segregated Army unit in 1942 then commissioned as a second lieutenant.

It also recounts how Robinson was court martialed, then acquitted, when he refused an Army bus driver’s demand to move to the back of the bus, and notes the racial discrimination Robinson experienced in his Major League Baseball career.

The page was “mistakenly” removed in the DEI purge, an unnamed Department of Defense official told ABC News, adding that it and others that had been taken down — including those honoring the Tuskegee Airmen, the Marines at Iwo Jima and Navajo Code Talkers — would be restored.

Pentagon Press Secretary John Ullyot said in a statement to Forbes that errors are corrected “in rare cases that content is removed—either deliberately or by mistake—that is out of the clearly outlined scope of the directive.”

Ullyot defended the Trump administration’s directive to dismantle DEI initiatives at the agency, however, referring to the acronym as “Discriminatory Equity Ideology” which he said “is a form of Woke cultural Marxism that Divides the force, Erodes unit cohesion and Interferes with services’ core warfighting mission.”

Chief Critic

“This isn’t history being forgotten; it’s history being erased!” Civil rights attorney Ben Crump wrote on Instagram in response to Robinson’s page being taken down.

Crucial Quote

Ullyot said “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” and does not “view or highlight them through the prism of immutable characteristics, such as race, ethnicity, or sex.”

Tangent

The Pentagon also removed, then restored, a webpage honoring Black Medal of Honor recipient Army Maj. Gen. Charles Calvin Rogers earlier this week. The webpage was taken down and led to a “404” error message and the word “medal” in the URL was changed to “deimedal,” The Guardian reported. The Pentagon told the paper the story about Rogers “was removed during auto removal process.”

Key Background

Trump, on the first day of his presidency, signed an executive order to terminate all DEI “mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities” across the federal government and eliminate any positions dedicated to promoting DEI. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth subsequently ordered the removal of all content that highlights diversity efforts in the military from the Pentagon’s websites and social media accounts by March 5. A database obtained by the Associated Press showed 26,000 photos and online posts flagged for erasure, including those referencing history-making women and minorities in the military. Some content appeared to be identified for deletion simply because it contained the word “gay,” including service members with the last name “Gay” and an image of the Enola Gay aircraft that dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan in World War II, according to the AP.