Stealing valor from Black soldiers, families

The military is not just a chapter in my life. It’s my bloodline, my inheritance, and my foundation. 

My father, Floyd McAfee, was a career Army officer. My uncles fought in World War II. My younger brother stood guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery. My nephew and many cousins also served.

As a teenager, my father left Tuskegee Institute to enlist in President Harry S. Truman’s newly desegregated Army. After finishing his hitch and then graduating from college, he chose an officer’s commission over an opportunity to play for the Green Bay Packers.

Reared as an Army brat, my family and I lived in a dozen places — Army bases named for Confederate heroes, overseas in Germany, and at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

My husband served in the Marine Corps.

Yet for all the valor, all the sacrifice to the country by my family and friends, I have never been able to shake the bitter truth: From the Revolutionary War to the war in Afghanistan, Black Americans have fought for this nation, but this nation has not always fought for them. 

Often disrespected by their peers and their country while in uniform, Black service members are being dishonored in death at the most sacred resting place in the country: Arlington National Cemetery, where my dad is buried.

On March 14, 2025, Authorities at Arlington National Cemetery stripped from its website information about heroic or noteworthy Black, Latino, Indigenous, and women service members buried there. Task & Purpose magazine, which covers the military, reported that the cemetery’s website scrubbed “dozens” of pages that told the stories of outstanding service members of color at rest in Arlington’s hallowed ground. 

The move aligns with President Donald Trump’s crusade against diversity, equity, and inclusion in the federal government and military. In less than two months, Trump has undone generations of work by Black soldiers, sailors, and Marines who fought and changed an unfair system. His purge of the military began at the top, with the living.

Trump fired General Charles Q. Brown Jr. — a decorated fighter pilot and commander who battled racism in his own squadron between combat missions, and was only the second Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in its 76-year history. Trump also dismissed the Navy’s first female secretary, stripped images of women and people of color from military recruiting materials, and banned use of the word “diversity.” 

The president’s hand-picked defense secretary — a man who sports prominent tattoos affiliated with white Christian nationalism — declared that the military was too focused on diversity. But history asks a different question: are diversity and strength mutually exclusive? Weren’t men and women of color who served with distinction — the colored Union soldiers of the Civil War, Harriet Tubman, the Navajo Code Talkers — the definition of strength?

To erase their contributions is not just an insult. It’s a lie.

I chose government service over military service, and was fortunate enough to work in the White House Office of Public Liaison under President Bill Clinton. 

I was there in 1997 when seven Black World War II soldiers finally received the military’s highest award, one that had been denied them for half a century: the Medal of Honor. 

The histories of those who gave their lives for a freedom they were often denied are now at risk of being forgotten, an afterthought beneath monuments of those whose sacrifices were never questioned.

Now is the time for action to keep that from happening. 

We must speak up and challenge the false narrative that diversity is at odds with military strength. We must demand that Congress and military leaders preserve their histories. And we must vote with purpose, choosing leaders who respect the full, unvarnished history of all veterans. 

Floydetta McAfee has written and produced documentary specials, including “Pilgrimage to Tulsa: Witnessing America in Greenwood;” “Eyes on The Prize: Then and Now,” and “Women of the Movement: 1954-1965.”