Black Medal of Honor recipient removed from US department of defense website

The US defense department webpage celebrating an army general who served in the Vietnam war and was awarded the country’s highest military decoration has been removed and the letters “DEI” added to the site’s address.

On Saturday, US army Maj Gen Charles Calvin Rogers’s Medal of Honor webpage led to a “404” error message. The URL was also changed, with the word “medal” changed to “deimedal”.

Rogers, who was awarded the Medal of Honor by then president Richard Nixon in 1970, served in the Vietnam war, where he was wounded three times while leading the defense of a base.

According to the West Virginia military hall of fame, Rogers was the highest-ranking African American to receive the medal. After his death in 1990, Rogers’s remains were buried at the Arlington national cemetery in Washington DC, and in 1999 a bridge in Fayette county, where Rogers was born, was renamed the Charles C Rogers Bridge.

As of Sunday afternoon, a “404 – Page Not Found” message appeared on the defense department’s webpage for Rogers, along with the message: “The page you are looking for might have been moved, renamed, or may be temporarily unavailable.”

A screenshot posted by the writer Brandon Friedman on Bluesky on Saturday evening showed the Google preview of an entry of Rogers’s profile on the defense department’s website.

Dated 1 November 2021, the entry’s Google preview reads: “Medal of Honor Monday: Army Maj Gen. Charles Calvin Rogers.” Below it are the words: “Army Maj Gen Charles Calvin Rogers served through all of it. As a Black man, he worked for gender and race equality while in the service.”

“Google his name and the entry below comes up. When you click, you’ll see the page has been deleted and the URL changed to include ‘DEI medal,’” Friedman wrote.

The Guardian has asked the defense department for comment.

Since taking office in January, Donald Trump has moved his administration to roll back DEI – diversity, equity and inclusion – efforts across the federal government.

One executive order sought to terminate all “mandates, policies, programs, preferences and activities in the federal government”, which the Trump administration deems “illegal DEI and ‘diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility’ (DEIA) programs”.

In a win for the Trump administration on Friday, an appeals court lifted a block on executive orders that seek to end the federal government’s support for DEI programs.