Unpacking claim of Colin Powell's name disappearing from Arlington Cemetery webpage

Yahoo

25-03-2025

In March 2025, a rumor spread alleging that U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth removed former Secretary of State Colin Powell's name from a webpage about noteworthy military figures on the Arlington National Cemetery website. The claim circulated following the removal of links to pages about Black, Hispanic and female veterans buried at the site, among other Department of Defense removals.
The Office of Army Cemeteries, a division of the U.S. Army, operates the prominent military cemetery just outside Washington. The Army and other military branches report to the DOD.
For example, one X user posted (archived) on March 20, "Hegseth has removed Colin Powell's name from a list of notable Americans, buried at Arlington National Cemetery. In fact all the names removed were people of color or women. Only white men were left on the list. Your thoughts?" Additional X users shared the rumor about Hegseth, who is white, and Powell, who was Black and died in 2021. Users on Facebook and other social media platforms spread the claim, too.
However, as of March 24, the cemetery website's page titled "prominent military figures" still featured a brief biography describing Powell's military service, in which he achieved the rank of a four-star Army general. Even so, while neither Hegseth nor anyone under the umbrella of the Defense Department entirely deleted Powell's name from the page, sometime between late February and early March, one or more people with access to edit the page removed a partial amount of biographical information pertaining to Powell's race, as well as one mention of his name from the biography of another noteworthy service member. Someone later restored those pieces of information on the page in mid-to-late March.
The remainder of the rumor claiming "Hegseth removed the names of every person of color and every woman," and that "only white men were left in place," was not entirely true. In a post from Hegseth's personal X account, he called the entire rumor "fake."
In an email, Kerry L. Meeker, the chief of public affairs at Arlington National Cemetery, labeled the claim that someone removed Powell's name from the website "inaccurate." "All notable graves are represented on our website – including Colin Powell," she said.
She pointed us to a statement on the cemetery's website that mentioned "no service members have been permanently removed from the 'notable graves' section of our website." The statement also referenced "compliance with executive orders issued by the president and Department of Defense instructions."
President Donald Trump issued an executive order on Jan. 20, 2025, the first day of his second term, seeking to end "illegal" programs and activities related to diversity, equity and inclusion, as well as DEIA, with the "A" standing for accessibility. The order targeted DEIA-related "mandates, policies, programs, preferences and activities in the federal government, under whatever name they appear."
An archived version of the Arlington National Cemetery website's "prominent military figures" page from late February 2025 displayed Powell's biography beginning with the sentence, "General Colin Powell, a Vietnam veteran, was the first African American to hold three of the U.S. government's highest positions: national security adviser (1987-1989), chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1989-1993), and secretary of state (2001-2005)."
By early March, another archived version of the page confirmed the removal of the fact that Powell was the first African American to hold the three positions. Sometime between March 17 and 21, one or more people restored this sentence to the page.
Between February and March, one or more people also removed, then later restored, a mention of Powell's name in the biography for Brig. Gen. Roscoe Conklin "Rock" Cartwright. The late-February version featured a sentence entirely removed from the page, reading, "Cartwright founded a social group that provided mentoring and leadership training to African American officers; prominent members included Generals Colin Powell (Section 60) and Roscoe Robinson Jr. (Section 7A)."
Colin Powell receives the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George H.W. Bush at the White House on July 3, 1991. (Howard L. Sachs/CNP/Getty Images)
Other temporary removals from the "prominent military figures" page included 17 mentions of "African American," around a dozen for "black" and one for "Irish American." Many of the mentions of "African American" and "black" described milestones, such as Brig. Gen. Hazel W. Johnson-Brown, originally documented on the page as "the first African American woman general in the U.S. Army."
The biography for Maj. Kurt Chew-Een Lee originally began by describing him as "the first Asian American officer in the Marine Corps." As of March 21, that fact, as well as the words "Asian American," no longer appeared on the page. The most recent version of his biography also removed the following sentence featured in previous years: "Kurt Chew-Een Lee's record of service not only honored his country, but also demolished anti-Asian stereotypes: 'I wanted to dispel the notion about the Chinese being meek, bland and obsequious,' he told the Los Angeles Times in 2010."
In an apparent oversight in the removal process of race-related content, as of March 17, the page still displayed Lt. Col. Alexander T. Augusta of the U.S. Army as "the highest-ranking African American officer of the Civil War," as well as "the Army's first black physician, the United States' first black hospital administrator (Freedman's Hospital, Washington, D.C.) and its first black professor of medicine (Howard University)."
Sometime between March 17 and 21, some mentions of "Black" and "African American" reappeared on the website, according to archived page captures. As of March 24, the lone mentions of "Irish American," "Asian American" and "anti-Asian stereotypes" had not reappeared.
After we asked Meeker about the removals from Lee's biography about demolishing anti-Asian stereotypes and the fact Augusta's biography still featured four mentions of his race, Arlington National Cemetery spokeswoman Becky Wardwell provided a link to a video from Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell. In the March 20 video, Parnell said, in part, "We want to be very clear, history is not DEI." He also discussed making mistakes and mentioned the usage of artificial intelligence to perform some content edits to comply with the Trump administration's orders.
Parnell's mention of errors possibly at least partially referenced the removal, and later restoration, of entries for three women on the "prominent military figures" page. Those women were Lt. Cmdr. Barbara Allen Rainey, "the first woman pilot in the Navy," Maj. Marie Therese Rossi, "the first American female combat commander to fly into battle" during the Persian Gulf War, and Lt. Kara Spears Hultgreen, "the first female carrier-based fighter pilot in the U.S. Navy, and the first woman to qualify as an F-14 combat pilot."
All three women disappeared entirely from the cemetery website's page in late February or early March, and reappeared sometime between March 17 and 21, according to archived page captures.
Burns, Robert, et al. "Colin Powell Dies, Trailblazing General Stained by Iraq." The Associated Press, 19 Oct. 2021, https://apnews.com/article/colin-powell-dead-covid-9c918dc1c137ebf368f2cbb461e4fad4.
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"Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs And Preferencing." The White House, 20 Jan. 2025, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/ending-radical-and-wasteful-government-dei-programs-and-preferencing/.
"Learn More about Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility (DEIA)." New York Department of State, https://dos.ny.gov/dei.
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