Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered the Navy to review the names of vessels honoring prominent civil rights leaders, including Harvey Milk, who was one of the country’s first openly gay elected officials and a Navy veteran.
News of Mr. Hegseth’s decision, reported earlier by Military.com, comes just days into Pride Month, which celebrates the contributions of luminaries in the L.G.B.T.Q. community.
Instead, Mr. Hegseth’s order was intended as a rebuke of Pride Month, keeping with the Trump administration’s drive to expunge diversity, equity and inclusion efforts across the federal government, according to a senior defense official familiar with the decision.
Mr. Milk is one of several trailblazers whose name has been identified for possible removal from naval vessels. According to a senior official familiar with a memo from John Phelan, the secretary of the Navy, they include Thurgood Marshall, the first Black Supreme Court justice; Ruth Bader Ginsburg, another Supreme Court justice, who became a feminist icon; Harriet Tubman, who, after being born into slavery, became an abolitionist instrumental in the Underground Railroad; Lucy Stone, a prominent abolitionist and suffragist; Medgar Evers, a civil-rights leader who was assassinated by a member of the Ku Klux Klan; Cesar Chavez, a labor leader; and Dolores Huerta, another labor leader.
The names of the additional ships under review were previously reported by CBS News. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about unannounced policy decisions.
“Secretary 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,” the Pentagon said in a statement issued on Tuesday.
Any potential ship renaming, the statement said, “will be announced after internal reviews are complete.”
In January, Mr. Hegseth issued an order stating that the military would not expend resources to recognize cultural awareness months, including Pride.
Representative Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House, condemned the move.
“Our military is the most powerful in the world — but this spiteful move does not strengthen our national security or the ‘warrior’ ethos,” Ms. Pelosi, a California Democrat, wrote on social media. “It is a shameful, vindictive erasure of those who fought to break down barriers for all to chase the American Dream.”
The vessels in question are mostly John Lewis-class fleet replenishment ships, named for Representative John Lewis of Georgia, a prominent figure in the civil rights movement who died in 2020. Congress began funding the construction of those ships in late 2015, and the first of them was launched in 2021. Not all of the vessels that might be subject to renaming have yet been put into service.
The U.S.N.S. Cesar Chavez and U.S.N.S. Medgar Evers belong to a separate class of supply ships but serve a similar purpose of supporting warships at sea with fuel, ammunition and other supplies.
Several of the military’s official web pages noting the introduction of some of those vessels were nonfunctional Tuesday afternoon.
Karoun Demirjian is a breaking news reporter for The Times.
John Ismay is a reporter covering the Pentagon for The Times. He served as an explosive ordnance disposal officer in the U.S. Navy.
The post U.S. May Strip Harvey Milk’s Name From Navy Vessel appeared first on New York Times.
