Did Arlington National Cemetery remove Gen. Colin Powell's profile from the cemetery's website in March 2025? A spokesperson for the cemetery told Lead Stories that the cemetery had removed a category relating to African-American service members, but that Powell's profile had been moved to two different sections of the website.
Many social media posts in mid-March 2025 claimed that Powell's profile had been removed from the cemetery's website, including one widely shared X post (archived here) on March 20, 2025, which read:
Pete Hegseth removed Colin Powell's name from a list of notable Americans, buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Hegseth also removed the names of every person of color and every woman on the same list. Only white men were left in place.
This is what the post looked like at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Fri Mar 21 12:36:33 2025 UTC)
As of March 21, 2025, the "African-American history" sub-section of the "Notable Graves" section of the website -- under which Powell's profile had been indexed -- was no longer live:
However, the profile that had been indexed under the "African-American history" subsection was still live, (archived here) though users could only access it with a direct link, and could not navigate towards it from the cemetery's homepage:
In response to our questions, a spokesperson for Arlington National Cemetery provided the following explanation in a March 21, 2025, email:
Per the DoD directive, we removed the categories of "African American" " Hispanic American" and "Women" within the Notable Graves portion of our website and moved individual stories (like Gen. Colin Powell) to different categories that aligned with their service contributions.
The spokesperson added that "Gen. Powell can be found under prominent military figures and politics and government," and provided links to those two website sections: "Politics and Government"; "Prominent Military Figures."
As shown below, a profile of Powell could indeed be viewed, along with several other service members, as of March 21:
In a March 19 statement, cemetery officials said their restructuring of the website was an effort to achieve "compliance with executive orders issued by the president and Department of Defense instructions."
