Last Tuesday ESPN’s Jeff Passan reported on X that a page on the Department of Defense website about Brooklyn Dodger great Jackie Robinson’s army career, headlined “Sports Heroes Who Served,” had been taken down and that “DEI” had been added to the page’s URL. “The ghouls who did this should be ashamed,” wrote Passan. “Jackie Robinson was the embodiment of an American hero. Fix this now.”

The Pentagon’s move was in sync with other Trump administration efforts to roll back programs that celebrate the nation’s diversity, even including the history of slavery and the civil rights movement.

But in less than a day, the DOD had restored the page to its website in response to numerous media stories and comments by members of Congress, Robinson family members, the head of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, some major league players, and others.

Conspicuously absent were any words from MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred, whose office coordinates the annual Jackie Robinson Day celebration every April 15. It was on that day in 1947 that Robinson made his major league debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers, breaking baseball’s color line that had been in place since the late 1800s. In 1997, the 50th anniversary of his rookie season, MLB retired Robinson’s number—42. Since 2009, all players wear number 42 on Jackie Robinson Day to honor his achievements as both a Hall of Fame ballplayer and a civil rights activist.

The Pentagon’s brief cancellation of Jackie Robinson comes in the wake of Trump’s crusade against DEI, which the White House has called “immoral.” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has fully embraced the crusade. Toward that goal, the Pentagon also removed a page about Ira Hayes, a Native American who was one of the marines pictured raising the American flag at Iwo Jima during World War II, as well as articles about Native American code talkers. The DOD also deleted an article about a Tonawanda Seneca officer who drafted the terms of the Confederacy’s surrender at Appomattox. A DOD webpage about a Black Medal of Honor recipient, Maj. Gen. Charles Calvin Rogers, was also briefly taken down but later restored. A DOD page about an all-Japanese-American unit that fought in WWII was also removed and then restored.

After the DOD scrubbed these websites, Pentagon spokesperson John Ullyot explained, “As Secretary Hegseth has said, DEI is dead at the Department of Defense.” When Robinson’s website was restored, Ullyot ate his words: “Everyone at the Defense Department loves Jackie Robinson.”

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Trump has battled with outspoken athletes before, but he met his match with Robinson, who remains one of the nation’s most iconic figures, a symbol of America’s battle against racism who was also a liberal Republican.

A four-sport athletic standout at UCLA, Robinson joined the Army during World War II. At Ft. Riley in Kansas, Robinson wanted to join its baseball team. An officer told him, “You have to play for the colored team”—except there was no Black team. Robinson’s superiors sought to keep him out of officer candidate school, but he persevered and became a second lieutenant. In 1944, while assigned to Fort Hood in Texas, he refused to move to the back of an army bus when the white driver ordered him to do so.

Robinson faced trumped-up charges of insubordination, disturbing the peace, drunkenness, conduct unbecoming an officer, and refusing to obey the orders of a superior officer. Voting by secret ballot, the nine military judges—only one of them Black—found Robinson not guilty. That November, he was honorably discharged from the Army.

Describing the ordeal, Robinson later wrote, “It 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.”

Three years later, Robinson would suit up for the Dodgers.

His arrival marked the culmination of more than a decade of protests. Beginning in the 1930s, a broad coalition of organizations—the Black press, civil rights groups, the Communist Party, progressive white activists, left-wing unions and radical politicians –waged a sustained campaign to integrate the national pastime.

This protest movement set the stage for Dodgers executive Branch Rickey to sign Robinson to a contract in 1945. Robinson promised Rickey that—at least during his rookie year—he wouldn’t respond to the verbal barbs from fans, managers, and other players he would face on a daily basis.

His first test took place a week after he joined the Dodgers, during a game against the Philadelphia Phillies. Phillies manager Ben Chapman called Robinson the n-word and shouted, “Go back to the cotton field where you belong.”

Though Robinson seethed with anger, he kept his promise to Rickey, enduring the abuse without retaliating. He won the National League’s Rookie of the Year award. After that, he increasingly spoke out against racial injustice in speeches, interviews and his regular newspaper columns for The Pittsburgh Courier, the New York Post and the New York Amsterdam News.

Many sportswriters and other players thought he was too angry and vocal about racism. A 1953 article in Sport magazine titled “Why They Boo Jackie Robinson” described Robinson as “combative,” “emotional,” and “calculating,” as well as a “pop-off,” a “whiner,” a “showboat,” and a “troublemaker.” A Cleveland paper called Robinson a “rabble rouser” who was on a “soap box.” The Sporting News headlined one story “Robinson Should Be a Player, Not a Crusader.”

Nonetheless, Robinson’s relentless advocacy got the attention of the country’s civil rights leaders.In 1956, the NAACP gave him its highest honor, the Spingarn Medal—the first athlete to receive that award. In his acceptance speech, Robinson explained that although many people had warned him “not to speak up every time I thought there was an injustice,” he would continue to do so.

After Robinson hung up his cleats in 1957, he stayed true to his word, publicly urging President Dwight Eisenhower to send troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to protect Black students seeking to desegregate its public schools. In 1960, impressed with the resilience and courage of the college students engaging in sit-ins at Southern lunch counters, he agreed to raise bail money for the students stuck in jail cells.

Robinson initially supported the 1960 presidential campaign of Senator. Hubert Humphrey, a Minnesota Democrat and staunch civil rights ally. But when John Kennedy won the party’s nomination, Robinson—worried that JFK would be beholden to Southern Democrats who opposed integration—endorsed Republican Richard Nixon. He quickly regretted that decision after Nixon refused to campaign in Harlem or speak out against the arrest of Martin Luther King Jr. in rural Georgia. Three weeks before Election Day, Robinson said, “Nixon doesn’t deserve to win.”

In February 1962, Robinson traveled to Jackson, Mississippi, to speak at a rally organized by NAACP leader Medgar Evers. Later that year, Robinson traveled to Albany, Georgia, to draw media attention to three Black churches that had been burned to the ground by segregationists. He then led a fundraising campaign that collected $50,000 to rebuild the churches.

In 1963 he devoted considerable time and travel to support King’s voter registration efforts in the South. He also traveled to Birmingham, Alabama, as part of King’s campaign to dismantle segregation in that city. “His presence in the South was very important to us,” recalled Wyatt Tee Walker, chief of staff of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Robinson also consistently criticized police brutality. In August 1968, three Black Panthers in New York City were arrested and charged with assaulting a white police officer. At their hearing two weeks later, about 150 white men, including off-duty police officers, stormed the courthouse and attacked 10 Panthers and two white supporters. When he learned that the police had made no arrests of the white rioters, Robinson was outraged.

“The Black Panthers seek self-determination, protection of the Black community, decent housing and employment and express opposition to police abuse,” Robinson said during a press conference at the Black Panthers’ headquarters.

He challenged banks for discriminating against Black neighborhoods and condemned slumlords who preyed on Black families.

Robinson refused to participate in a 1969 Old Timers game because he didn’t see “genuine interest in breaking the barriers that deny access to managerial and front office positions.” At his final public appearance, throwing the ceremonial first pitch during the 1972 World Series, Robinson observed. “I’m going to be tremendously more pleased and more proud when I look at that third base coaching line one day and see a black face managing in baseball.”

No major league team had a Black manager until the Cleveland Indians hired Frank Robinson in 1975—three years after Jackie Robinson’s death. This season, only two of 30 MLB teams have African American managers: Ron Washington of the Angels and Dave Roberts of the Dodgers. There’s only one African American general manager: Dana Brown of the Astros.

Trump, of course, has friends among sports figures, but many pro athletes have objected to his views and policies.

In 2016, after the media revealed that Trump had boasted that he could “grab” women’s genitals, he dismissed the comment as just “locker-room talk.” Washington Nationals pitcher Sean Doolittle was one of many athletes who denounced Trump, tweeting, “As an athlete, I’ve been in locker rooms my entire adult life and uh, that’s not locker-room talk.” That year, Trump also attacked NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who refused to stand during the national anthem to protest US racism. “Maybe he should find a country that works better for him,” Trump told an interviewer. After he was first elected, Trump challenged NFL owners to release any player who kneeled in protest during “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

“Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out! He’s fired. He’s fired!” Trump bellowed at a rally in Alabama in September 2017. The next weekend, more than 200 NFL players kneeled in defiance of Trump.

After the Golden State Warriors won the 2017 NBA championship, Steph Curry said he wouldn’t attend a meeting with Trump, who retaliated by tweeting that the team was disinvited. Much the same thing happened in 2018, when only a handful of NFL Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles players would commit to attending a White House event with Trump. The president canceled it. (The 2025 champion Eagles have formally accepted a White House invitation this year,) In 2019, Trump criticized soccer great Megan Rapinoe, star of the US Women’s National Team, for not singing the national anthem, and after the team won the Women’s World Cup, its members, too, declined to meet with Trump.

In 2019, Mookie Betts, then an outfielder for the World Series champion Boston Red Sox, along with eight of his teammates and manager Alex Cora, refused Trump’s invitation to visit the White House, The next year, playing for the Los Angeles Dodgers, Betts took a knee during the national anthem to protest American racism and the killing of George Floyd by a Minnesota police officer. “I’m more than an athlete,” said Betts, who also led the Dodgers in sitting out a game to protest the police shooting of another Black man, this time in Wisconsin. Manager Dave Roberts joined the protest. In 2022, Betts produced a documentary, Jackie Robinson: Get to the Bag, broadcast on Fox Sports.

Betts may soon have to decide again whether to visit Trump at the White House with his current team, the 2024 World Series champion Dodgers. The Pentagon’s dissing of Jackie Robinson could make it even more unlikely that the team will participate in a celebration with Trump.

In recent years athletes have become more outspoken on issues of racism, homophobia, sexism, American militarism, immigrant rights, and other issues. All of them stand on Robinson’s shoulders.