Buttigieg tours Mississippi civil rights site and says transportation is key to equity in the US
JACKSON, ma’am. — Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg visited the home of the slain civil rights leader on Friday Medgar Evers in Mississippi’s capital, saying afterward that transportation is important to securing equality and justice in the United States.
“Disparities in access to transportation affect everything else: education, economic opportunity, quality of life, safety,” Buttigieg said.
Buttigieg spent Thursday and Friday in Mississippi, his first trip to the state, to promote projects receiving money from a 2021 federal infrastructure bill. One of those is a planned $20 million improvement to Medgar Evers Boulevard in Jackson, a stretch of US Highway 49.
Evers’ daughter, Reena Evers-Everette, spoke with Buttigieg about growing up in the modest one-story home her family moved to in 1956 — about how she and her older brother would put on clean white socks and then slide across the hardwood floors. their mother, Myrlie, waxed them.
It’s the same house where Myrlie Evers spoke with her husband, the Mississippi NAACP leader, about the work he did to register black voters and challenge the state’s strictly segregated society.
Medgar Evers had just arrived home in the early hours of June 12, 1963, when a white supremacist fatally shot him, hours after President John F. Kennedy gave a televised speech on civil rights.
After touring Evers’ home, Buttigieg spoke about the recent anniversary of the assassination. He also noted that Friday marks 60 years since Ku Klux Klansmen were ambushed and murdered three civil rights workers – Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman – in Neshoba County, Mississippi, while investigating the fire of a black church.
“As we carry the moral weight of our legacy, it feels a little strange to be talking about street lighting, ports, highway funding and some of the other everyday transportation needs that we have to address here,” Buttigieg said.
Still, he said fair transportation has always been “one of the most important battlegrounds in the fight for racial and economic justice and civil rights in this country.”
Buttigieg said Evers called for a boycott of gas stations that did not allow black customers to use their restrooms, and that Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama.
U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, who visited sites in his Mississippi district with Buttigieg, said the predominantly Black city of Jackson has been “left out of so many funding options” for years, while money to expand roads has gone to more affluent suburbs. He called the $20 million a “down payment” for future financing.
“This deposit will solve some of the problems that come with years of neglect – potholes, businesses closed because there is no traffic,” Thompson said.
Thompson is the only Democrat representing Mississippi in Congress and is the only member of the U.S. House of Representatives delegation to vote for the infrastructure bill. Buttigieg also said Republican U.S. Senator Roger Wicker voted in favor of the bill.