CBS News reports that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who this week ordered the renaming of a fleet replenishment oiler named in honor of the late pioneering gay rights activist Harvey Milk, is considering more name changes.
Documents obtained by CBS reveal all of the potential changes are of vessels named after civil rights icons, including the USNS Thurgood Marshall, USNS Ruth Bader Ginsburg, USNS Harriet Tubman, USNS Dolores Huerta, USNS Lucy Stone, USNS Cesar Chavez and USNS Medgar Evers.
CNN NewsNight host Abby Phillip put it into perspective Tuesday when she asked a panel of experts, “Come on, what are we doing here? Is the idea just that if you’re a woman, if you’re a person of color in American history, you don’t get remembered or recorded on a ship, but if you’re a Confederate traitor to this country you do?”
Phillip noted how, in the past, President Donald Trump has loudly complained whenever a municipality decided to remove a statue of or change a street name associated with Confederate war veterans. Quoting the president from a 2017 tweet, she reminded viewers, “You can’t change history, but you can learn from it.”
“Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, that’s worth defending, but not Harriet Tubman, Thurgood Marshall, or Medgar Evers?” she said.
The memo said the renaming of naval ships would help reinforce Trump’s emphasis on “reestablishing the warrior culture.”
Hegseth “is committed to ensuring that the names attached to all DOD installations and assets are reflective of the Commander-in-Chief’s priorities, our nation’s history, and the warrior ethos,” Chief Pentagon Spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement.
As Phillip noted Tuesday night, few represent the “warrior ethos” better than Tubman, who risked her freedom and her life when she helped enslaved Southern persons escape from captivity via the Underground Railroad.
The order marking the name changes comes from Navy Secretary John Phelan, acting under direct orders from Hegseth, who has implemented the president’s ban on any programs promoting diversity, equity and inclusion with particular zeal.
In March, Jackie Robinson’s story vanished from the department’s website, without explanation, only to quietly reappear the next day after the decision to remove it sparked an angry backlash.
The page referenced Robinson’s military service during World War II. In explaining the removal, Pentagon spokesman John Ullyot derided DEI initiatives as “a form of Woke cultural Marxism that Divides the force, Erodes unit cohesion and Interferes with the services’ core warfighting mission.” Ullyot was later demoted for his role in the controversy.
A page commemorating Major General Charles C. Rogers, who was awarded the Medal of Honor by President Richard Nixon after he defended a U.S. base in Vietnam despite being wounded three times, was also removed.
In a similar move, World War II veteran and civil rights leader Medgar Evers’ name was deleted from the Arlington National Cemetery website that had honored Black Americans who served in the military.
“There’s really no other way to put it. It’s blatant and open racism and sexism,” wrote one X account holder. “All the DEI labels on websites. What other justification is there? Let’s hear it MAGA. What’s the justification?”
He continued, “The problem is they want to label every minority or woman accomplishment as DEI.”
One MAGA commenter responded, “I’m pretty sure they’re trying to remove a white male’s name too.”
There’s no proof of that, but if the white male is named after a Confederate soldier, odds are his name will remain, as Phillip pointed out.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called the decision to remove Milk’s name, and possibly the others, “an utter abomination in terms of the extreme MAGA Republican effort to continue to erase American history, and we’re not going to allow it to happen.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, writing on X, said Hegseth “should be ashamed of himself and reverse this immediately.”
A final decision on the other vessels has not been made, Parnell said. Hegseth rushed the Milk removal to coincide with Pride month, a defense department official told Military.com.
Milk, a Navy veteran, was one of the first openly gay elected officials in U.S. history, serving on the board of supervisors in San Francisco during the 1970s before being assassinated by a disgruntled fellow board member in November 1978. The assassin also killed San Francisco Mayor George Moscone during his rampage at San Francisco City Hall.
Changing the names of ships is rarely done. Naval tradition frowns on such renaming, Military.com reports. It was last done in 2023, when the cruiser USS Chancellorsville and research ship USNS Maury, names with ties to the Confederacy, were given new monikers.
That decision was made by a commission, created by Congress, to reconsider names that appear on military bases and ships and had ties to the Confederacy.
