A visitor to Arlington National Cemetery’s website earlier this year would have seen links to information about a wide range of notable African Americans, Hispanic Americans and women buried there.
Not anymore.
The Trump administration unpublished, altered, or hid content and links about all three groups buried at the cemetery ‒ one of the nation’s most hallowed military sites.
Links for other “notable graves” of veterans remain, as well as for sports figures, and leaders in politics, medicine, science and culture.
The alterations are part of a sweeping effort by the Trump administration and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to remove references throughout the department to diversity, equity and inclusion issues or “gender ideology.”
Dozens of pages and links on the national cemetery’s website appear to have been caught up in the purge.
One now-missing page on the cemetery’s website linked to 14 educational lesson plans on African Americans, including walking tours and a unit on the famed Tuskegee Airmen, according to a search of the Wayback Machine by Internet Archive. The unlinked lesson plans are still available through a web search.
A similar lesson plan page devoted to the Borinqueneers ‒ a storied unit of Puerto Rican soldiers awarded for their service in the world wars and the Korean War ‒ is now even more difficult to find.
Other pages also vanished from the website, but are still accessible through Google searches.
