ESPN baseball expert blasts DOD over removal of Jackie Robinson article
The Pentagon is facing backlash after an article dedicated to baseball legend Jackie Robinson and his time in the Army was removed from the Department of Defense’s (DOD) website.
ESPN baseball insider Jeff Passan on Tuesday accused the DOD of politicizing Robinson’s contributions to the military and called for the department to immediately rectify the situation.
“The ghouls who did this should be ashamed,” Passan wrote on the social platform X. “Jackie Robinson was the embodiment of an American hero. Fix this now.”
The department used to have a webpage about Robinson, detailing how he was drafted in 1942 and assigned to a segregated Army cavalry unit in Fort Riley, Kan. But as of Tuesday, the page no longer existed on the website; instead, users encounter a 404 error message, and the URL now features "dei" before the story's headline.
The DOD on Wednesday appeared unaware Robinson’s page had been scrubbed. In response to The Hill’s request for comment, a spokesperson thanked The Hill for bringing it to their attention and said they would “look into it.”
Later, Pentagon Press Secretary John Ullyot in a statement expressed support for the elimination of "DEI" at the Pentagon, but added that in cases were content is removed that should not have been, it will be corrected.
“As Secretary Hegseth has said, DEI is dead at the Defense Department," Ullyot said in the statement.
"Discriminatory Equity Ideology is a form of Woke cultural Marxism that has no place in our military. It Divides the force, Erodes unit cohesion and Interferes with the services’ core warfighting mission. 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 accordingly.”
Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball in 1947, going on to be a perennial major league all-star and cementing his place in American sports history.
During his time in the Army before that, the sports legend also fought back against rampant racism in the armed forces.
After being drafted during World War II in 1942, Robinson was commissioned a second lieutenant in 1943.
In one incident on July 6, 1944, Robinson boarded the Army bus and was ordered to move to the back. He refused. Robinson was taken into custody by military police and subsequently court-martialed. He was later acquitted.
After his acquittal, he was transferred to Camp Breckinridge, Ky., where Robinson served as a coach for Army athletics. He was honorably discharged in November 1944.
Although Robinson’s page can still be read through the Internet Archive, the removal of his webpage follows a similar incident with the removal of pages dedicated to the Navajo Code Talkers, a Black recipient of the Medal of Honor and Japanese American veterans.
Following backlash to the removals, the Trump administration said it was the mistake of an automated process.
For weeks, the Defense Department has been purging any diversity, equity and inclusion content, after President Trump’s executive order banning such practices in the military.
The department has created a database identifying such information. It includes more than 26,000 images that have been flagged for removal across all military branches, according to The Associated Press. Most of the purge targets women and minorities.
This story was updated at 1:41 p.m.
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