In its campaign against diversity, equity, and inclusion, the Trump administration is intent on imposing cultural amnesia. The president’s March executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” made clear his intent to delete from the national memory all that is unsettling, shameful, and sinful. But the whitewashing is a collective effort, involving legislation at the local and national levels as well as executive orders; only with the complicity of others can the government deny ugly truths like racism, erase people whose existence and narratives defy omission, and purge everything from children’s books to advanced critical studies—even if it’s all done via algorithm. Then there are the classrooms, libraries, parks, museums, even cemeteries: anything on display that punctures the myth or pricks the conscience must go.
The latest example: Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s assault on the U.S. Naval Academy’s Nimitz Library. Hegseth apparently discovered that military-service academies were not acting in accordance with the executive order Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling. Why institutions of higher education would be expected to comply with an order explicitly targeting K-12 remains an open question. But among the Nimitz Library’s “900 books that may run afoul” of Hegseth’s sensitivities is a biography on Jackie Robinson.
Prior to Hegseth’s visit, 381 of the 900 books initially identified on the basis of a “keyword search” were removed. The Robinson bio seems to have survived the purge process so far. Others have not—among them, the award-winning Racial Justice and the Catholic Church by Catholic theologian and ethicist Bryan Massingale. Curiously, of the handful of sports-related books that appear on the purge list, none is overtly about baseball. The roster of disappeared tomes includes a significant amount of literary criticism and history dealing in any way with race, gender, inclusion, and identity. The collection of baseball titles in the library catalog addressing these issues, sometimes via the color line, remains currently untouched.
A simple search of the Nimitz Library online catalog shows over thirty Robinson-related publications, including all three of his autobiographies: Jackie Robinson: My Own Story (with Wendell Smith, 1948), Wait Til Next Year: The Life Story of Jackie Robinson (with Carl Rohan, 1960), I Never Had It Made (with Alfred Duckett, 1972). The reporting on the initial nine hundred indicated that a generic biography was under review. Though that list has to date not been released, I suspect that the book is Arnold Rampersad’s Jackie Robinson: A Biography (1997).
Published on the fiftieth anniversary of Robinson’s reintegration of major league baseball, this biography, over five hundred pages with index and extensive endnotes, is considered a definitive work, a piece of solid scholarship on baseball and in the genre of biography. Rampersad is a Trinidadian immigrant to the United States, born into a multiethnic and multiracial family. A noted academic, literary critic, and esteemed biographer, he was invited by Robinson’s widow Rachel to write the first in-depth biography of her husband. Given access to Robinson’s private papers, Rampersad portrays a complex man in his contested times. There is no escaping the racism that complicated Robinson’s relationships, his military service, and his athletic and business careers—and which motivated his civil-rights activism.
Rampersad was a worthy choice for this task. He admits to being
drawn to biography because I saw the African-American personality as a neglected field despite the prominence of race as a subject in discussions of America. African-American character in all its complexity and sophistication was, and still is, by and large, a denied category in the representation of American social reality.
His impressive body of work includes biographies of W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, and Ralph Ellison, as well as Days of Grace, the memoir he coauthored with the late tennis star and human-rights activist Arthur Ashe. All of these are still part of the Nimitz Library collection.
It’s not the first time in the era of MAGA that Robinson has been swept up in a cultural purge. In early 2023, two books about Jackie Robinson, including one authored by his daughter, were among those pulled from classroom shelves and school libraries in Florida. Technically, these books were not banned, but rather were under review by “media specialists” in various school districts across the state.
The review process was driven by a Florida state law instituted under the DeSantis administration, known colloquially as the STOP “Wrongs Against Our Kids and Employees” (W.O.K.E.) ACT, CS/HB 7 – Individual Freedom. The act’s imprint is evident in the Library Media and Instructional Materials Training, which specifically calls for avoiding materials that use “unsolicited strategies that could be seen as indoctrination” or “contain divisive materials such as Critical Race Theory, culturally responsive teaching, social justice, and social emotional learning.”
The two books about Jackie Robinson complicate matters even further because they are not so much about Robinson as they are about intergenerational, interracial, and interreligious friendships. Thank You, Jackie Robinson (1974) is a work of fiction by Barbara Cohen with drawings by Richard Cuffari. Set in 1947 New Jersey, the novel narrates a friendship between a Jewish boy, Sammy, whose father has died, and Davy, a sixty-something African American cook hired by his mom to prepare meals for their inn. The two bond over their love of the Dodgers as they travel together with Davy’s adult daughter and husband to watch the team play. Racism is alluded to when they plan a trip to Pittsburgh and acknowledge that accommodations for a racially mixed party will be prohibitive. The book contains one use of the n-word, when the young narrator cautions against ever saying it, because doing so for “a middle-class Jewish boy whose folks had voted for Roosevelt four times was like using a really filthy swear word.” When Davy is hospitalized after a heart attack, Sammy journeys alone from New Jersey to Brooklyn to secure Jackie Robinson’s get-well wishes on a baseball for his friend, convinced of the healing properties of a team-autographed ball. While the gift lifts Davy’s spirits, it cannot prevent the inevitable.
In 1978 the book was made into an ABC Afterschool Special. A tearjerker, the short movie was shot in black and white, a period piece that makes seamless use of vintage game film of Robinson in action. Thematically the content of the book and film deals with the illness and death of a loved one. Today this alone may warrant a trigger warning; however, such experiences are not unfamiliar to children who have lost a grandparent or parent at a young age. Rationale for the book’s exclusion from school libraries is absent.
More baffling is the review de-shelving Sharon Robinson’s account of her father’s lifelong friendship with a young Jewish neighbor, Steven Satlow. The Hero Two Doors Down (2016) takes some literary license with the details but, Robinson writes, “During these troubling times of global, racial, cultural, and religious unrest, I decided that this classic story of friendship needed to be shared with the next generation of readers.” The story of the first encounter between her parents and Steven’s family was initially the topic of her earlier children’s book Jackie’s Gift: A True Story of Christmas, Hanukkah and Jackie Robinson (2010) and appears in this one as well. Robinson explained in an interview, “Neither my father nor my mother understood that Jews did not have Christmas trees on Christmas Eve. So, when they heard that Steve didn’t have one, dad said, okay, and he went out and brought a Christmas tree and met Steve’s mom for the first time.” This awkward moment in the late 1940s resulted in an enduring interreligious dialogue and friendship between the families that continues to this day.
Among the Nimitz Library holdings is Two Pioneers: How Hank Greenberg and Jackie Robinson Transformed Baseball—and America. Whether or not this book made the list of 900 is currently unknown; however, the removal of Memorializing the Holocaust : Gender, Genocide and Collective Memory should certainly raise suspicions about the criteria employed. Amnesia ensures that historic connections between racism and antisemitism cannot foster alliances among the oppressed.
These days, Jackie Robinson’s life and actions are considered dangerous memories. His own words in the preface of his 1972 autobiography, published in the month of his death, still hit home:
As I write this twenty years later, I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.
On April 15, 2004, Major League Baseball inaugurated Jackie Robinson Day, marking his crossing of the color line with his 1947 debut as a Brooklyn Dodger. Commemorated annually across baseball, the most visible ritual of the day is the wearing of the number “42” (Robinson’s jersey number) by all players and on-field personnel, including umpires. In some ways, this memorializing functions both as an institutional mea culpa and as a discomforting reminder of the price to be paid for choosing amnesia over unadulterated truth. In an age of legislated amnesia, remembrance is resistance—in classrooms, libraries, parks, museums, even on the fields of play.
