A Black soldier who was awarded the Medal of Honor at the Civil War battle retold as the finale of the 1989 movie “Glory” has been scrubbed from a Pentagon website, with an article on the soldier labeled as “DEI” in the now-broken web link.
Sgt. William Carney, a member of the 54th Massachusetts Colored Infantry Regiment, was the first Black American to earn the Medal of Honor. He was awarded the medal for fighting at Fort Wagner, South Carolina in July 1863. The 54th’s failed assault on Wagner is the climactic scene of “Glory,” during which Denzel Washington acts out Carney’s battlefield heroics.
But as of Wednesday morning, the 2017 article “Meet Sgt. William Carney: The first African-American Medal of Honor recipient” (archived version) has been removed from the Pentagon’s Defense.gov domain, which is the primary public information website of the Department of Defense. The page now reverts to a 404 error — an internet term for a missing page — and the URL address for the page now has “DEI” added to its title.
The same article remained up on Wednesday on the Army’s official website, without an altered URL.
Carney earned the Medal of Honor at the Second Battle of Fort Wagner in July 1863. During the failed assault, he carried the American flag forward into the fray, sometimes crawling, and planted it at the base of the fort’s walls, according to the story on the Army’s website. Despite being shot several times, he held the flag aloft until he was rescued, and carried it back to Union lines as the 54th retreated.
Pentagon officials did not respond to Task & Purpose questions on why Carney was missing from the Defense.gov site, but the Department of Defense has removed dozens of documents in recent weeks after orders from President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to scrub the department of race- and gender-focused policies and communications.
Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said Monday, “I think the president and the secretary have been very clear on this, that anybody that says in the Department of Defense that diversity is our strength is, frankly, incorrect. Our shared purpose and unity are our strength.”
A string of missing pages amid ‘DEI’ hunt
Carney’s missing page is one of a wide range of erased pages from the defense.gov and other military-run websites, many of which now redirect to URLs labeled with “DEI.”
Task & Purpose reported last week that pages on Black, Hispanic and women troops at Arlington National Cemetery had been taken down, as well as information on several Medal of Honor recipients.
Several news organizations have since reported on other erased pages.
- Tuesday night, TV station KSBW found that an article on Jackie Robinson — the first Black baseball player to play in Major League Baseball — had been taken down.
- Axios spotted several missing pages on the Code Talkers of World War II, widely celebrated soldiers and Marines from several Native American tribes that used their native language as a code to communicate over radios. Marine Code Talkers in the Pacific were Navajo, from tribes in Arizona and New Mexico. A smaller, often forgotten group of Comanche, mostly from Oklahoma, served the same role in the Army in the European theater.
- The Washington Post found that pages on two of the four Marines caught in a photo raising a flag on Iwo Jima — one of the most iconic photographers in American history — had been removed
- The Associated Press spotted pages removed on the 4,000 American soldiers of Japanese heritage who fought in World War II, known as the Nisei soldiers.
- One such page, on Medal of Honor recipient Maj. Gen. Charles Calvin Rogers, was restored Monday after extensive media coverage on its removal, including from the Guardian. Rogers was the highest-ranking Black soldier — and one of the highest ever — to receive the Medal when he earned it as a lieutenant colonel in Vietnam. Like Carney’s page, Rogers’ had been removed with a redirected URL that put “DEI” in front of its title.
The growing list of disappeared history articles on Pentagon websites drew the attention Wednesday of five members of the U.S. Senate who each have military ties. All five signed onto a letter written by Sen. Tammy Duckworth that called the hunt for race- and gender-related content on websites a “middle finger to our veterans.”
“It’s the latest betrayal from an administration that continues to give the middle finger to our veterans and their life of service,” the letter reads. “We should be celebrating the heroes who have made our military stronger, allowing them to inspire the next generation to serve and defend our nation.”
Democratic Sens. Richard Blumenthal, Mark Kelly, Ruben Gallego and Jack Reed all were co-signers. Reed is the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee. Blumenthal is the ranking member on the Senate Committee for Veterans Affairs. Gallego deployed to Iraq as an enlisted Marine in 2005, and Kelly and Duckworth are both former military aviators who flew combat missions.
The real soldiers behind ‘Glory’
Sgt. William Carney was the first Black American to earn the Medal of Honor. Born into slavery, Carney was eventually freed and later joined the 54th Massachusetts during the war.
“Glory,” released in 1989, is a true-to-life retelling of the 54th, but neither Carney or any other real Black soldiers are directly portrayed in the movie. Instead, the Black characters in the film were fictionalized versions based on biographical sketches of soldiers known to have been in the 54th.
The movie does include the 54th’s real white commander, Col. Robert Gould Shaw, played by Matthew Broderick. Shaw’s real-life death in the Wagner assault is depicted in the movie.
The Black soldier in the film who perhaps most resembles a real member of the 54th may be Morgan Freeman’s Sgt. Maj. John Rawlins, the unit’s senior non-commissioned officer. Rawlins’ seniority and position is a close match to one of the 54th’s best-known soldiers, Sgt. Maj. Lewis Douglass, the son of abolitionist Frederick Douglass.
The soldier whose combat actions in the movie most resemble Carney’s Medal of Honor actions is Pvt. Trip, played by Denzel Washington, who won an Oscar for the performance.
Historians have long noted that several dramatic elements of the movie are fictional, including Washington’s most famous scene as Trip, when he endures a whipping. Historians agree that whipping, or flogging, was officially banned in both armies early in the war and was essentially unheard of. There is no record of a 54th soldier enduring it.
The film also takes liberties with the make-up of the 54th, implying that its soldiers were mostly former slaves when much of the unit was made up of free Black men from, and around, Boston.
The final battle also — like nearly all war movies — is far from wholly accurate, but its general tone, several small actions and its outcome mostly match the record of the 54th’s assault on Wagner, including Carney’s actions.
In the second battle at the fort, Union forces attempted to breach the defenses. During the battle, Carney saw the soldier carrying the unit’s flag fall and proceeded to carry it forward to rally the 54th.
In the film, Pvt. Trip, grabs an American flag from a fallen soldier and carries it forward. In the movie’s climactic moment, he holds the flag aloft as Confederate cannons fire at the attacking wave of Union soldiers, killing them all.
That part, though, isn’t quite right. Though the 54th suffered over 40% casualties in the battle, Carney and Douglass both survived. Douglass even wrote his father a letter that night that tried to capture the terror and trauma of the fight
“Saturday night we made the most desperate charge of the war on Fort Wagner, losing in killed, wounded and missing in the assault, three hundred of our men,” Douglass wrote. “The splendid 54th is cut to pieces…. Goodbye to all. If I die tonight, I will not die a coward.”
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