Before Rosa Parks changed history by refusing to give up her seat on a segregated Alabama bus, a righteous Black Army lieutenant was court martialed for taking the same stand in Texas.
His name: Jackie Robinson.
Robinson is best known, of course, for breaking baseball’s color barrier in 1947.
But on July 6, 1944, Robinson refused a driver’s order to move to the back of an Army bus.
Although he was acquitted of the six counts against him, including insubordination, the court-martial prevented him from deploying to fight in Europe with his battalion. He received an honorable discharge.
Last week, Robinson, dead for 54 years, suffered another injustice when his Army record was wiped from a military website in a racist and regressive DEI purge.
The erasure followed with President Trump’s order to the Pentagon to scan federal websites for articles, social media posts, photos, news articles and videos to remove any web pages that “promote diversity, equity and inclusion.”
An article detailing Robinson’s military career has since been restored, but the damage was already done.
“We take great pride in Jackie Robinson’s service to our country as a soldier and a sports hero, an icon whose courage, talent, strength of character and dedication contributed greatly to leveling the playing field not only in professional sports but throughout society,” Robinson’s son, David Robinson, a Jackie Robinson Foundation board member, said in a statement.
” A recipient of both the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal, he of course is an American hero.”
Removing Robinson’s record puts Trump in the same company with every white ballplayer who ever threw at, spit at or spiked Robinson because they didn’t want to play with or against a Black ball player.
He’s as bad as any parent at a game who called Robinson a n—er in front of their children, or motel manager who wouldn’t rent Robinson a room on the road.
It’s the most insulting anti-woke move since Florida banned some books with titles about Parks, Henry Aaron and Roberto Clemente.
Among the problems with the DEI attacks and the backlash against affirmative action is the assumption that Black success has been based on racial preference and not hard work and merit.
The reality, though, is that our success has often come in spite of being Black — not because of it.
The Rev. Al Sharpton recalled meeting Robinson as a youth when his mentor, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, brought Sharpton and his mother to a fundraiser at Robinson’s Connecticut home.
“My mother felt like she was in the presence of somebody immortal,” Sharpton said on MSNBC. “That’s who Jackie Robinson was. To take him down in the name of DEI?
“He didn’t get where he got because they had some kind of diversity program. He merited that. And it’s the most racist thing in the world to act like these people who put their lives on the line in the military only got there because somebody did something extra for them. No. They earned it.”
Robinson wasn’t the only former soldier wiped off a military web site. The Department of Defense also erased a page honoring Vietnam War hero Charles Calvin Rogers, a Black U.S. Army general and Medal of Honor recipient.
This was after Trump fired CQ Brown Jr., a Black four-star Air Force general, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and replaced him with a retired white three-star general.
Brown had been a supporter of diversity initiatives.
Martin Luther King Jr. called Robinson “a sit-inner before sit-ins, a freedom rider before freedom rides.”
Still, Robinson, a Republican, endorsed Richard Nixon for president in 1960 before becoming disillusioned with the GOP.
“A new breed of Republicans has taken over the GOP,” Robinson later said. “It is a new breed which is seeking to sell to Americans a doctrine which is as old as mankind — the doctrine of racial division, the doctrine of racial prejudice, the doctrine of white supremacy.”
