“Now some are asking what transportation could possibly have to do with racial justice,” Buttigieg stated. “Some have been asking that very pointedly. So it’s all the more fitting that we’re here at this bridge, this piece of infrastructure that became a battleground in the struggle for equal rights; this place that reminds us how transportation and civil rights have always, always been related.”
On March 7, 1965, roughly 600 civil rights marchers headed east from Selma on U.S. Route 80, yet just as far as the Edmund Pettus Bridge when state and local lawmen attacked them with billy clubs and tear gas, driving them back. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led a symbolic march to the bridge two days later.
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Buttigieg continued to describe the slave ships that carried slaves to the New World, the “ferries and wagons of the Underground Railroad,” the train in Plessy v. Ferguson, and the bus Rosa Parks rode on as examples of transportation playing a key role in the history of civil rights in the U.S. “We are reminded again and again how deep is that relationship between the physical movement of human beings and the social movement to change this country,” Buttigieg continued. “And so it falls to all of us who work in transportation to carry that movement forward.”
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Buttigieg has faced denouncement for tying matters of race into talk of the country’s infrastructure. In November, he raised eyebrows when he talked about the bipartisan infrastructure bill addressing racism in highways during a White House press briefing.
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“I’m still surprised that some people were surprised when I pointed to the fact that if a highway was built for the purpose of dividing a White and a Black neighborhood, or if an underpass was constructed such that a bus carrying mostly Black and Puerto Rican kids to a beach, or that would have been in New York, was designed too low for it to pass by, that that obviously reflects racism that went into those design choices,” Buttigieg announced on November 8, 2021.
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Meanwhile, Buttigieg said Wednesday that “all options are on the table” during a discussion about oil prices after MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle asked if President Biden would consider “working something out with Iran.” Ruhle asked Buttigieg if Biden would consider activating the Keystone XL Pipeline or “working something out with Iran” during MSNBC’s “The 11th Hour” on Wednesday. Political commentators, personalities, and politicians denounced Buttigieg on Twitter for the comments. Critics called for American energy independence as the Russians continue to attack Ukraine.
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