Wow, a chance to write about a baseball player! Thanks, MAGA!

You may have heard what happened the other day. Trump’s apparatchiks, in their quest to scrub all vestiges of racial diversity from federal websites (they call diversity “a form of Woke cultural Marxism”), somehow saw fit to erase Jackie Robinson from the Pentagon’s online roll call of athletes who’d served their country.

Yes, that Jackie Robinson.

His military service during World War II was flushed down the Orwellian memory hole some time on Tuesday. We think it was Tuesday. An ESPN reporter noticed that Jackie’s page was gone on Tuesday night, so it’s not clear how long the erasure was actually in effect, because the enemies of “cultural Marxism” haven’t provided a timeline. Even if they were to do so, I’m disinclined to believe anything they’d say.

What we do know is that some time on Wednesday afternoon, they restored Robinson’s page to the Pentagon website via what they called a “digital content refresh.” I’ll quote their gobbledygook:

“We are pleased by the rapid compliance across the Department with the directive removing DEI content from all platforms. In the rare cases that content is removed – either deliberately or by mistake – that is out of the clearly outlined scope of the directive, we instruct the components and they correct the content…”

I don’t speak MAGA, but I can translate:

“Oops.”

Naturally, they failed to specify whether Robinson’s erasure was done “either deliberately or by mistake,” indeed whether the scrubbers’ zeal was wrongfully “out of the clearly outlined scope of the directive,” but now that the “components” are back in place (as are others), I do have a modest suggestion for the Pentagon, a suggestion about Robinson that of course carries no weight.

As punishment for that erasure, it would behoove the scrubbers to beef up one particular “component” of Robinson’s military stint. The page devotes a total of three lines – one terse paragraph – to the fact that he was court-martialed after refusing to move to the back of an Army bus. There’s so much more to that story, and the scrubbers should be compelled to tell it. As an act of penance.

They could just copy/paste what I’ve got here – and these are just highlights:

On an Army base in Texas, on July 6, 1944, 2nd Lieutenant Robinson visited what was called “the colored officer club,” then boarded a shuttle bus and sat in a middle row next to Virginia Jones, the wife of a fellow Black officer. The white bus driver mistakenly thought Jones was white, so he yelled: “Hey, you, sittin’ beside that woman – get to the back of the bus!”

Robinson refused. He told the driver – accurately – that military buses had been desegregated. But the driver called his dispatcher to say that a “n–” on the bus was making trouble. Robinson (according to his own subsequent testimony) told the driver, “Stop f– with me” and “Look here, you son of a b–, don’t you call me no n–.”

Soon after, the military police handcuffed Robinson, shackled his legs, and drove him to MP headquarters. At the HQ, a white enlisted man called Robinson a “n–,” and, as Robinson later testified, “I told him that if he ever called me a n– again, I would break him in two.”

On August 2, a nine-member court-martial panel was convened to hear The United States v. 2nd Lieutenant Jack R. Robinson. Six votes were required to convict. Only five did so. But Robinson was scarred by the experience, and later lamented his acquittal “was a small victory, for I had learned that I was in two wars, one against the foreign enemy, the other against prejudice at home.”

Actually, that victory was pivotal. Had Robinson been convicted and dishonorably discharged, it’s highly doubtful Dodgers owner Branch Rickey would’ve chosen a Black guy tossed from the Army to break baseball’s color line.

The Pentagon’s scrubbers are welcome to paste that material on Robinson’s page – although those “components” would probably strike them as anti-white or culturally Marxist.

But wouldn’t they like another time at bat? Nah, you all know the answer.

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Copyright 2025 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Subject to Change newsletter. Email him at [email protected]