In this image provided by the U.S. Navy, the John Lewis-class replenishment oiler USNS Harvey Milk (T-AO-206) conducts a replenishment at sea in the Atlantic Ocean, Dec. 13, 2024 |U.S. Navy via AP
WASHINGTON—We’ve heard of pettiness and we’ve heard of racism and prejudice, and what Donald Trump’s Defense Secretary, former Fox “News” host Pete Hegseth, did exemplifies both. The administration does not miss carrying out any of the countless ways it can to display its disdain for people of color, labor activists, and all their allies.
Furthering his boss’s crusade to whitewash, literally, U.S. history, Hegseth ordered the renaming of some Navy shops now named for the United Farm Workers leader Cesar Chavez and his surviving co-chair and comrade in arms, Dolores Huerta.
Their possible offense in his eyes? We know both are people of color and neither is a right-winger.
But then, remember that Hegseth ordered Defense Department archivists to remove the biography of Jackie Robinson, a highly decorated World War II veteran who also integrated major league baseball, from DOD’s files. And Hegseth ordered the removal of a picture of the U.S. plane that dropped the first atomic bomb, on Hiroshima, almost 80 years ago, the Enola Gay. For Hegseth, the word “gay” is forbidden.
The duo of labor leaders wasn’t the only people whose names are now commemorated on the ships, which Hegseth ordered removed.
CBS News and the Black Information Network reported Hegseth also plans to erase two trailblazing Supreme Court Justices: Ruth Bader Ginsburg—a noted crusader for equal rights—and Thurgood Marshall. As the NAACP’s lead counsel, Marshall successfully argued the Brown v Board of Education case outlawing Jim Crow. And LBJ named Marshall the High Court’s first African-American justice.
Also on Hegseth’s hit list: Ships named for Lucy Stone, a leading suffragist and abolitionist of the 1800s, and Harriet Tubman, the noted and heralded former enslaved woman who escaped and then later was a key “conductor” of escaping enslaved people to freedom via the Underground Railroad.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., predicted Hegseth would lose his bid to rename the ships. “Every time the MAGA extremists have tried to cancel certain parts of American history, the American people have said ‘no,’ and they’ve backed down,” he told a press conference.
We hate to tip Hegseth off, but he missed one heroic person of color in his holy war. The vessels are all in the “John Lewis” class of ships. No, not the labor leader, but the African-American civil rights crusader, Atlanta congressman, and confidante of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
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