Posted on Mar 13, 2025
Army photo.
Arlington National Cemetery is the most venerated final resting ground in the nation, overseen by silent soldiers in immaculate uniforms with ramrod-straight discipline. Across its hundreds of acres in Virginia, they watch over 400,000 graves of U.S. service members dating back to the Civil War, including two presidents, and more than 400 Medal of Honor recipients.
But in recent weeks, the cemetery’s public website has scrubbed dozens of pages on gravesites and educational materials that include histories of prominent Black, Hispanic and female service members buried in the cemetery, along with educational material on dozens of Medal of Honor recipients and maps of prominent gravesites of Marine Corps veterans and other services.
Cemetery officials confirmed to Task & Purpose that the pages were “unpublished” to meet recent orders by President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth targeting race and gender-related language and policies in the military.
Gone from public view are links to lists of dozens of “Notable Graves” at Arlington of women and Black and Hispanic service members who are buried in the cemetery. About a dozen other “Notable Graves” lists remain highlighted on the website, including lists of politicians, athletes and even foreign nationals.
Also gone are dozens of academic lesson plans — some built for classroom use, others as self-guided walking tours — on Arlington’s history and those interred there. Among the documents removed or hidden from the cemetery’s “Education” section are maps and notes for self-guided walking tours to the graves of dozens of Medal of Honor recipients and other maps to notable gravesites for war heroes from each military service. Why information on recipients of the Medal of Honor — the nation’s highest award for combat valor — would be removed is unclear, but three of the service members whose graves were noted in the lessons were awarded the Medal of Honor decades after their combat actions following formal Pentagon reviews that determined they had been denied the award on racial grounds.
Like the “Notable Graves” lists, some of the lesson plans remain live but ‘walled-off’ on the cemetery’s website, with no way to reach them through links on the site. Task & Purpose located the de-linked pages by copying the original URL addresses from archived pages at Archive.org or by searching specifically for the pages on Google, which still lists them.
On at least one page that can still be accessed on search engines, language referring to civil rights or racial issues in the military appears to have been altered. A page on Black soldiers in World War II read in December that they had “served their country and fought for racial justice” but now only notes that memorials in the cemetery “honor their dedication and service.”
A spokesperson at Arlington National Cemetery — which is operated by the Army under the Army Office of Cemeteries — confirmed that the pages had been delisted or “unpublished” but insisted that the academic modules would be republished after they are “reviewed and updated.” The spokesperson said no schedule for their return could be provided.
“The Army has taken immediate steps to comply with all executive orders related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) personnel, programs, and policies,” an Army spokesperson at Arlington told Task & Purpose. “The Army will continue to review its personnel, policies, and programs to ensure it remains in compliance with law and presidential orders. Social media and web pages were removed, archived, or changed to avoid noncompliance with executive orders.”
As of March 12, the three original “Notable Graves” lists and the dozens of educational pages appear to still be posted on Arlington’s military domain — arlingtoncemetery.mil — as webpages. Some can be accessed on the cemetery’s website by tracing a multi-click trail of embedded links on other still-public pages. It was unclear if those ‘backdoor’ paths to the pages were left intentionally or were overlooked when the main links to the unpublished pages were removed.
The removal of the academic lessons hit hard for Civil War historian Kevin Levin, who first noted that Arlington had removed the pages on his substack newsletter. Levin lectures and writes on Civil War history and each year leads trips of history teachers — mostly high school and middle school teachers — through Arlington, so they can better teach students about the cemetery.
Levin noticed that the lessons were missing, he told Task & Purpose, when a teacher he works with tried to prepare a lesson for her students.
“One of the teachers went online and couldn’t find the pages, so that’s when she contacted me,” Levin said. He compared the wholesale removal of entire lesson plans to the recent revelation that photos of the first bomber to drop an atomic bomb had reportedly been marked for removal from a Pentagon photo archive. “I don’t know who did it. If we’re talking about one of these, low-level [Department of Government Efficiency] people or whatever, who has just been given a list of key terms, yeah, kind of the Enola Gay situation, right? It’s got ‘gay’ in it, so we have to delete it, right?”
Levin said Arlington’s own historians often accompany his group’s trips.
“I know the historians and the educators at Arlington, because they meet with our staff every year, and they’ve done a great job of creating lesson plans, they go out of their way to meet with teachers. And I know for a fact that a lot of our teachers are using these lesson plans,” Levin said. “I get the sense that this is being carried out in the sloppiest manner. I get the sense that we’re talking about people who are setting up algorithms and are looking for certain things. I don’t know if this is the end of it. I don’t think it is, I just don’t think these people, whoever is responsible, really knows what they’re doing.”
Levin said he hesitated to post about the missing documents because public exposure could reflect poorly on the professional historians who work at the cemetery and who are “exactly what you want from a federal agency that is responsible for interpreting the past.”
But the slash-and-burn approach to the website, he said, was too much.
“I’ll put it bluntly, this is a shitshow,” he said. “And this one hit home, so I did what I did.”
Task & Purpose compared Arlington website pages available on March 12 to copies preserved on Archive.org in December and early January. Between those dates, several web pages appear to have been walled off from public view on the main Army-run Arlington website, though not fully deleted. They are:
Some pages, while they do still exist on the Arlington National Cemetery website, cannot be navigated to from the website itself, and have essentially been walled off. Below are direct links to the pages as they exist at time of publication, as well as links to archived versions.
Six educational modules have been removed from the website’s educational section (archived version here). The modules vary from walking tour maps and fact-sheets to classroom worksheets, PowerPoint presentations and lesson plans. A missing module on Nurses in the Spanish American War included six PowerPoint presentations tailored for elementary, middle school and high school classes.
Many bear only tangential relations to DEIA-related topics. An Arlington spokesperson confirmed the missing modules cover:
According to Archive.org pages, the Civil War section had 5 documents:
Though the lesson plans have been removed from the cemetery’s education page, a few of the documents can still be accessed indirectly. If a visitor navigates to the main “History of Arlington” page, links to the Freedman’s Village page are clickable in the text of the page. On that Freedman’s Village page, links to some of the still-live walking tours and other fact sheets are listed under “Additional Resources.” It’s unclear if these paths were left intentionally or overlooked in the unpublishing process.
But the missing lesson plans also cover topics with no obvious ties to the mandate to remove DEIA-related material, including three self-guided walking tours for the graves of Medal of Honor recipients. Each tour covers about 10 Medal of Honor recipients with directions to their graves and biographical fact-sheets.
Also missing are links to material Arlington dubbed “Honoring the Service Branches,” which until recently listed links to maps and fact-sheets for tours aimed at gravesites of specific notable members of the Marine Corps, Army, Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard. The page that previously held that material has been delinked and is blank.
None of the fact-sheets previously linked in the Medal of Honor or Service Branches pages mentioned the terms “diversity,” “equity,” or “inclusion,” according to archived copies reviewed by Task & Purpose.
The Service Branches fact-sheets appear to contain a glancing reference to racial and gender disparities in military history. For example, the walking tour fact-sheet focused on notable Navy graves covers about a dozen, including Rear Adm. Richard Byrd, Fleet Adm. William “Bull” Halsey and a monument to the USS Maine. The pamphlet also includes three women, including Rear Adm. Grace Hopper, and one half-page essay entitled “Women in Combat” that reviews the history of women in naval service.
It may be a similar story for the material struck from the cemetery’s Medal of Honor educational page.
For example, the walking guide of the central part of the cemetery highlights four of the best-known graves in the cemetery: the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, 1st Lt. Audie Murphy, Gen. James “Jimmy” Doolittle and Marine Gunnery Sgt. John Basilone, along with Lt. Vernon Baker.
Baker, a World War II soldier, saw his Medal upgraded in later reviews, along with Sgt. Henry Johnson from World War II and Sgt. Cornelius Charlton, who fought in the Korean War. Johnson and Charlton are highlighted on two other walking tours that have been hidden from view on the website.
Baker was, according to his citation and the now-unpublished Arlington fact sheet, a one-man wrecking crew as a platoon commander during an assault on a German artillery post in Castle Aghinolfi, Italy in April 1945. Facing heavy fire, he shot his way past lines of defenders, survived a dud grenade landing next to him, and — moving forward alone — used his own grenades to blow open hatches to artillery bunkers. With 19 of his platoon’s 25 soldiers wounded or dead in the attack, he kept up his assault on machine gun nests to cover the platoon’s withdrawal.
In 1997, Baker’s Distinguished Service Cross for the fighting was upgraded to the Medal of Honor after the 1997 review, along with six other Black soldiers. Baker was the only of the seven still alive.
He died in 2010, the walking tour fact-sheet says, and is interred at Arlington, Section 59, Grave 4408.
Senior Editor
Matt White is a senior editor at Task & Purpose. He was a pararescueman in the Air Force and the Alaska Air National Guard for eight years and has more than a decade of experience in daily and magazine journalism.
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