Veterans Day Desecration: U.S. Quietly Erases Memorial to Black WWII Liberators Amid Right-Wing Backlash

 Margraten, Netherlands – November 12, 2025

On the eve of Veterans Day, a chilling act of historical erasure unfolded across the Atlantic, as the American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC) quietly removed two commemorative panels honoring African American soldiers from the Netherlands American Cemetery in Margraten—sacred soil where 8,288 U.S. war dead rest, including 172 Black heroes who fought Nazis abroad while battling segregation at home. The vanishing act, uncovered by Dutch media and tied to a complaint from the conservative Heritage Foundation, has ignited international fury, with Dutch politicians uniting across the ideological spectrum to demand restoration or a new monument. Critics decry it as a blatant assault on Black military legacy, emblematic of the Trump administration’s broader purge of diversity initiatives.

The panels, installed in the visitor center’s rotating exhibit just last year, were fixtures in a space dedicated to the human stories behind the white marble crosses. One illuminated the dual burdens borne by roughly one million African American volunteers: combating Nazi fascism in Europe while enduring Jim Crow racism in a segregated U.S. Army. Often relegated to labor battalions, these soldiers dug graves, built roads, and unloaded supplies under fire—tasks that included constructing the very cemetery where many now lie. The second panel spotlighted Technician Fourth Class George H. Pruitt, a 23-year-old telephone engineer from New Jersey’s 43rd Signal Construction Battalion. On June 15, 1945—mere weeks after VE Day—Pruitt drowned in the Weser River near Bremen, Germany, while heroically attempting to rescue a white comrade whose Jeep had plunged into the current during a routine line-laying mission. His selflessness, documented in unit records and family lore, embodied the quiet valor of Black troops denied frontline glory.

Visitors noticed the panels’ absence over the summer, but the story broke last weekend via NRC Handelsblad, revealing a trail leading back to a March 2025 Heritage Foundation screed. The think tank—architect of Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for reshaping federal agencies—accused the ABMC of flouting President Trump’s executive order curbing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. The complaint targeted ABMC’s then-Chief Diversity Officer Priscilla Rayson, who was sidelined shortly after, her role scrubbed from the agency’s site. “Honoring Black soldiers who fought Nazis is now ‘woke’?” fumed Kees Ribbens, senior researcher at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies. “This is historical vandalism, plain and simple.”

The ABMC, which oversees 26 overseas cemeteries and 31 memorials, offered a tepid defense: The 15 magnetic panels are “designed to rotate” to showcase diverse tales, with four currently featuring Black service members. Pruitt’s story, they insisted, is merely “off display, not out of rotation.” Yet the panel on segregation—added amid 2024’s push for fuller narratives—appears retired following an “internal review,” per agency statements to Newsweek and The Guardian. Historians like Ribbens dismiss the rotation rationale as cover: “Why yank the segregation panel now, after it hung unchallenged for a year?” The timing aligns with Trump’s January 2025 directives, which have already excised Black history from Arlington National Cemetery websites and Pentagon exhibits, including a Tuskegee Airmen video briefly yanked before public outcry forced its return.

In Margraten—a verdant 65-acre site on Dutch land granted to the U.S. in perpetual lease—the removal strikes at the heart of transatlantic bonds forged in 1944-45. The cemetery, the Netherlands’ sole American military graveyard, honors liberators who stormed ashore post-Normandy, pushing through the Siegfried Line and Battle of the Bulge. Black units, comprising 12.5% of U.S. forces, were indispensable: The 614th Quartermaster Truck Company, dubbed the “Red Ball Express,” ferried ammo under moonlight; engineers like Pruitt wired communications across bomb-cratered fields. Yet back home, they faced lynchings and poll taxes. “They fought for a freedom they didn’t have,” Theo Bovens, Christian Democratic senator and chair of the Black Liberators in the Netherlands foundation, told NRC. “Erasing them dishonors the dead and the Dutch who owe them our liberty.”

Bovens’ group, launched in 2018 alongside the Faces of Margraten project (which has photographed 7,500 graves), unearthed the 172 Black burials overlooked for decades. Their advocacy prompted the panels’ addition, but now fuels a backlash. In an unprecedented show of solidarity, 11 of Limburg province’s 15 political parties—from progressive GroenLinks and D66 to center-right VVD and CDA—penned a letter branding the removal “indecent and unacceptable.” Far-right holdouts like PVV and Forum for Democratie abstained, but even they face pressure. The coalition demands the ABMC reinstate the panels or erect a permanent memorial on adjacent land, with Governor Emile Roemer and Eijsden-Margraten Mayor Alain Krijnen firing off missives to U.S. Ambassador Joe Popolo, a Trump appointee. “We value our alliance,” Krijnen wrote, “but this does not do justice to history.”

The uproar has rippled globally. On X, #RestoreMargraten trended with 2.5 million impressions, blending Dutch flags and WWII footage with indictments of “Trump’s erasure campaign.” Raphael Morris, nephew of buried soldier Julius Morris—a 21-year-old private killed days before penning a hopeful letter home—seethed to Newsweek: “It’s all about race. My uncle died for this?” In Missouri, where Morris tends the Greenwood Cemetery (burial ground for 50,000 African Americans), he vowed to rally U.S. veterans’ groups. The NAACP and Southern Poverty Law Center decried it as “vandalism of valor,” linking it to Heritage’s Project 2025, which envisions gutting federal historical preservation.

Heritage, unapologetic, doubled down via spokesperson: “DEI has no place in honoring all Americans equally.” But the irony bites: This comes as Trump’s team reinstates a Confederate obelisk at Arlington, lionizing “loyal slaves” marching with rebels—a monument critics call a paean to myth over memory. “We’re restoring heritage, not hiding it,” a White House aide quipped anonymously, but the contrast fuels charges of selective amnesia.

For Margraten’s Dutch adopters—families tending graves since 1945, passing the duty generationally—the slight wounds deep. “These boys are our boys,” said Frans Roebroeks of the Adoption Foundation. “Race doesn’t matter; sacrifice does.” As bagpipes wailed over wreaths on Veterans Day, locals laid flowers at the empty exhibit wall, a silent protest.

The saga underscores a transatlantic rift: While Dutch unity honors the full mosaic of liberators, Washington’s culture wars threaten to whitewash it. Will Popolo broker a fix, or will Limburg’s memorial rise as a rebuke? As Bovens put it, “These soldiers dug the graves and freed a continent. Burying their story? That’s the real desecration.” In the shadow of crosses aligned like sentinels, the fight for remembrance rages on—lest forgotten heroes fade twice.