As the Trump administration wiped out government websites for references to diversity and inclusion, materials from the Arlington National Cemetery website highlighting the graves of black and female service members have disappeared.
Among the obscure pages is a cemetery guide focusing on black soldiers, female military service and Civil War veterans. Some materials were still online on Friday, but were no longer easily accessible from the cemetery website.
Some sites dedicated to separation and civil rights were largely scrubbed. That section included lesson plans on walking tours and reconstruction focused on black soldiers.
The cemetery, run by the Army, said in a statement Friday it is working to restore links to content, pledging to “share stories of sacrifice to the nation with transparency and professionalism.”
“We hope to begin reissuing content next week,” Cemetery spokesperson Kelly Meeker said in an email Friday.
On Friday, the cemetery website still had an active page describing section 27, which included graves of thousands of African Americans who had been freed from slavery. Another active page included prominent African-Americans, including Medgar Evers, Thurgood Marshall and Colin L. Powell, buried on the premises.
Repairing the removed material will be in line with President Trump's executive order, the Cemetery said. One of Trump's orders targeting schools encourages crackdowns on “gender ideology and discriminatory equity ideology.”
Washington leader Adam Smith, a top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, threw changes to the website as part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to erase the achievements of women and people of color.
“Everything is deeply concerned,” Smith said in an interview. “I have never seen any issues within the military, even if I have concerns about how Day was handled in different places.”
He said the Department of Defense appears to be focusing on “fighting the daily cultural battles,” and an approach of “directly hostile to all kinds of diversity” would damage adoption.
The military has moved quickly to remove diversity references from its website since Trump took office. Reuters reported in January that the Air Force had temporarily suspended the military's first black pilot using educational videos for trainees.
Changes to the Arlington National Cemetery website had previously been reported by Task & Purpose, a military-focused news website.
Covering 639 grassy, hill acres in Virginia near the Potomac River, Arlington National Cemetery is a resting place for over 400,000 veterans and the largest U.S. military cemetery.
Boston's Civil War historian Kevin M. Levin said it would help identify changes to the website and take educators with valuable tools to connect students with history.
“This is an incredibly rich historical landscape,” he said of the cemetery. “And to see that it completely distorts or erases any of its history — as an educator and as a historian — it's incredibly troublesome.”
