Umair
Materials on the Arlington National Cemetery website highlighting the graves of Black and female service members have vanished as the Trump administration purges government websites of references to diversity and inclusion.
Among the obscured pages are cemetery guides focused on Black soldiers, women’s military service and Civil War veterans. Some of the materials were still online Friday, but they were no longer easily accessible through the cemetery’s website.
A part of the site devoted to segregation and civil rights was largely scrubbed. That section once included a walking tour focused on Black soldiers and a lesson plan on reconstruction.
The cemetery, which is operated by the Army, said in a statement on Friday that it remained committed to “sharing the stories of military service and sacrifice to the nation with transparency and professionalism” and that it was working to restore links to the content.
“We are hopeful to begin republishing content next week,” Kerry Meeker, a cemetery spokeswoman, said in an email on Friday.
On Friday, the cemetery’s website still had an active page describing Section 27, which includes the graves of thousands of African Americans freed from slavery. Another active page listed prominent African Americans — including Medgar Evers, Thurgood Marshall and Colin L. Powell — buried on the grounds.
The restoration of any removed material would be carried out in line with President Trump’s executive orders, the cemetery said. One of Mr. Trump’s orders, aimed at schools, urges a crackdown on “gender ideology and discriminatory equity ideology.”
Representative Adam Smith of Washington, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, cast the website changes as part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to erase the accomplishments of women and people of color.
“The whole thing is deeply concerning,” Mr. Smith said in an interview. “Even if you have concerns about the way D.E.I. was handled in a number of different places, I’ve never seen a problem within the military.”
He said that the Defense Department seemed to be focused on “fighting cultural fights day in and day out” and that its approach of “being directly hostile to any kind of diversity” would damage recruiting.
The military has moved quickly to remove references to diversity from its websites since Mr. Trump took office. Reuters reported in January that the Air Force had briefly paused using an instructional video for trainees about the first Black pilots in the military.
The changes to Arlington National Cemetery’s website were previously reported by Task & Purpose, a news website focused on the military.
Arlington National Cemetery, which covers 639 grassy, hilly acres in Virginia near the Potomac River, is the resting place of more than 400,000 veterans and is the largest U.S. military cemetery.
Kevin M. Levin, a Civil War historian in Boston who helped identify the website changes, said they would deprive educators of valuable tools for connecting students with history.
“This is an incredibly rich historical landscape,” he said of the cemetery. “And to see any of its history either distorted or erased entirely — as an educator, and as a historian — it’s incredibly troubling.”
