The Army took down its page commemorating a civil rights icon

Back in March, I wrote about the late Sarah Keys Evans, a Black veteran who played a key role in desegregating interstate travel. Before the summer of 1952, the 23-year-old private first class had never even taken part in a civil rights protest—but after she was arrested and jailed overnight in her Women’s Army Corps uniform for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white Marine, Keys Evans spent years fighting for justice through the courts, paving the way for Rosa Parks and the Freedom Riders.

I discussed Keys Evans’ underappreciated but important case with the author Amy Nathan, whose latest book, Riding Into History, tells her story. Her profile had risen in recent years, as I wrote at the time:

In 2020, nearly 70 years after Evans’ arrest, Roanoke Rapids installed a series of murals about the veteran’s fight for justice, which Evans told a Time reporter she saw as a tribute to all the overlooked women who “kept the spark going” during the Civil Rights Movement.

But weeks after that first piece ran, I received a tip that the Army had removed an article about Keys Evans from its official website. Based on screenshots captured by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, the article by T. Anthony Bell, first published in February 2014, was taken down last July, at the height of the second Trump administration’s campaign to scrub Black history from public monuments, institutions, and records. It remains unavailable.

That effort has hit military history particularly hard. Keys Evans’ story is just one of thousands about women and people of color in the armed services to be removed since Trump returned to office in January 2025. That February, at the behest of the president and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the assistant to the secretary of defense for public affairs issued a memorandum ordering senior Pentagon leadership to wipe military websites of any content promoting “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” 

“In accordance with recent policy changes and renewed digital content guidance, the Army temporarily unpublished content featured on cultural observance months webpages,” Christopher Surridge, an Army spokesperson, told Mother Jones in an emailed statement.

“We are tirelessly working through content featured on these webpages, and historical articles will soon be republished to better align with current guidance,” Surridge added. “As this is an ongoing process requiring a manual content review, article restoration might take some time.”

Following public outcry, some webpages were quickly restored, like an article about baseball player Jackie Robinson’s service in World War II and another about the highly decorated 442nd Regimental Combat Team, composed mostly of Japanese Americans. But many more articles about the contributions of marginalized communities to US military achievements are still hidden. 

Hegseth’s attacks on DEI go beyond censoring history. In the past year and half, the defense secretary has ordered the military to end its observance of heritage months, proposed strict grooming standards that would disproportionately impact Black and brown soldiers, and personally blocked women and Black service members from promotions.

On the eve of the nation’s 250th anniversary, which the administration has commemorated through sanitized displays seemingly designed to paper over the country’s complex past, the lessons of Keys Evans’ fight for justice and equality feel especially pertinent. Her story serves as a reminder that, in the words of T. Anthony Bell, the author of the Army’s now-spiked article:

The modern civil rights movement was much broader than the contributions made by the likes of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the NAACP or Rosa Parks in changing America’s unjust racial climate.

It was more about the thousands of unheralded, everyday citizens whose brave actions and collective voices blended together to create rumbles that shook the country’s consciousness, giving rise to individuals and organizations that would lead the struggle.

Pfc. Sarah Louise Keys was one such citizen.