Buttigieg draws link between transportation and history of civil rights at Edmund Pettus Bridge

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg on Sunday highlighted what he mentioned is the historic hyperlink between transportation and civil rights throughout a speech on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, to mark the 57th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday.”

“Now some are asking what transportation might presumably must do with racial justice,” Buttigieg mentioned. “Some have been asking that very pointedly. So it is all of the extra becoming that we’re right here at this bridge, this piece of infrastructure that turned a battleground within the wrestle for equal rights; this place that reminds us how transportation and civil rights have at all times, at all times been associated.”

On March 7, 1965, roughly 600 civil rights marchers headed east from Selma on U.S. Route 80, however solely so far as the Edmund Pettus Bridge when state and native lawmen attacked them with billy golf equipment and tear gasoline, driving them again. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led a symbolic march to the bridge two days later.

Buttigieg went on to additionally describe the slave ships that carried slaves to the New World, the “ferries and wagons of the Underground Railroad,” the practice in Plessy v. Ferguson and the bus Rosa Parks rode on as examples of transportation enjoying a key function within the historical past of civil rights within the U.S.

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“We’re reminded many times how deep is that relationship between the bodily motion of human beings and the social motion to vary this nation,” Buttigieg added. “And so it falls to all of us who work in transportation to hold that motion ahead.”

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Buttigieg has confronted criticism for tying problems with race into discuss of the nation’s infrastructure. In November, he raised eyebrows when he talked concerning the bipartisan infrastructure invoice addressing racism in highways throughout a White Home press briefing.

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg speaks throughout an occasion to debate investments within the U.S. electrical automobile charging community, outdoors Division of Transportation headquarters on February 10, 2022, in Washington, D.C.
(Drew Angerer/Getty Pictures))

“I’m nonetheless stunned that some individuals have been stunned after I pointed to the truth that if a freeway was constructed for the aim of dividing a White and a Black neighborhood, or if an underpass was constructed such {that a} bus carrying principally Black and Puerto Rican youngsters to a seaside, or that might have been in New York, was designed too low for it to cross by, that that clearly displays racism that went into these design decisions,” Buttigieg mentioned on Nov. 8, 2021.